THOUSANDS of the country’s most experienced doctors are expected to quit the National Health Service within three years after the introduction of a new contract which means they can retire early on full pensions.
Doctors’ leaders are warning that by 2007 nearly 4,000 senior consultants will have little or no financial incentive to continue working for the NHS. A mass exodus would exacerbate staffing problems in the service, which at present has a shortfall of 10,000 hospital doctors.
The new contract, which begins in 2005, boosts the salaries of top consultants by £20,000 to £92,000. Their pension contributions will rise in line with their pay meaning that they will hit the maximum achievable pension — just under half their salary — by their early sixties. Some could even retire as early as their mid-50s with only a slight deduction in their retirement benefits. For most there will be little incentive to keep working punishing NHS schedules until mandatory retirement.
The pension scheme — which will increase senior consultants’ pensions by about £10,000 a year — will be introduced in two waves in 2006 and 2007. More than 700 doctors who have been consultants for 30 years will reach their maximum pension on March 31, 2006 under the new contract. In the second wave, in 2007, a further 3,000 consultants who have served between 20 and 29 years, will qualify — 10 per cent of England’s consultant workforce.
Paul Miller, chairman of the British Medical Association’s consultants’ committee, said: “You could find you go into work on April 1, 2007 and every consultant over the age of 60 in the NHS has retired.
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“The majority will have hit their best point financially, and will want to go.
“It could be a retirement timebomb. You only need to lose one consultant from a speciality team and it will leave a big hole in provision.” Dr Miller said that ministers and NHS leaders needed to prepare for the possible exodus of a vastly experienced section of the workforce. “We are talking about a significant percentage of doctors and the NHS is going to have to find many more incentives to stagger their retirements.”
The BMA’s warning comes amid mounting concern about the future staffing of the NHS. Hospital trusts said that the introduction this month of the European Working Time Directive, which is designed to curb the long hours of trainee medics, could lead to a shortage of junior doctors.
A new contract for GPs, which allows them to take weekends and nights off, has also seen doctor shortfalls. There are also fears that retirements will significantly outpace recruitments over the next five years as a large number of overseas doctors, who settled in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s and took up mainly single-doctor practices, approach retirement.
Stephen Campion, chief executive of the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association, maintained that pension benefits would encourage only doctors already disillusioned with the NHS to call time on their careers. Worst-affected specialisms are likely to include radiographers, pathologists, paediatricians and psychiatrists.
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A survey last year by the magazine Hospital Doctor found that morale in the NHS had declined over the past five years, with eight out of ten consultants indicating that they would leave before normal retirement age.
Under the NHS Plan, published in July 2000, the Government vowed to increase NHS recruitment. Latest data suggests the target will be missed by between 1,000 and 1,500 doctors. A Department of Health spokeswoman said that the recruitment drive was ongoing, and the new consultants contract would help attract medics into staying with the health service.