As I was finishing my clinic today I caught the eye of Mags from Medical Staffing, she was lurking outside my clinic room, looking like she was about to cry. This can only mean one thing: she was about to ask the ultimate favour.
‘Z would you be able to go home and then come back tonight and do the night shift?’
As it happened I was worrying about money at this point, my house had a few unexpected bills, and then there’s the fact we’ll have to move to do some research, and my wife’s job isn’t secure. So a few hours overtime would help out nicely thank you. I managed to sleep this afternoon and even manged to do some cleaning. This is the second week of nights I’ll have done in the space of a month, neither of them have been rotated. The fact is that out in the sticks we can’t get the registrar’s to fill the rotas. We get registrars on the training programme but when they leave to have a baby, join the army, do a PhD we never get a replacement. So there’s 6 of us trying to staff a 10 man/woman rota.
Until 2007 this sort of job would have been filled by overseas doctors hoping to get their foot in the door of the NHS, and eventually get onto a training rotation and get a Number. But now the chances of overseas doctors getting a training rotation is very slim and there are far fewer of these doctors around. So we struggle to recruit. I rake in locum money, in the mean time my ward is short staffed.
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