Highest pay in NHS for rescue operation at capital’s worst A&E

 
PA
11 November 2013

Doctors are being offered the highest pay rates in the NHS to help rescue the worst-performing accident and emergency department in London.

Bosses at Queen’s hospital in Romford hope that salaries of up to £111,000 a year, 10 per cent more than normal, will ease what it admits is a “red alert” recruitment crisis that has left it with almost two-thirds of consultant posts unfilled.

There are only nine A&E staff consultants working across Queen’s, which deals with 900 ambulances and almost 3,000 casualty patients a week, and its sister hospital King George’s in Ilford.

The hospitals, which struggle to recruit due to their location in an unfashionable part of east London and as a result of a nationwide shortage of emergency doctors, should have 21 consultants. There is also a shortage of middle-grade casualty doctors, with only half of the 33 posts filled.

Locum medics account for half of staff on shifts, resulting in a “lack of senior decision-making and reliable cover”. There has also been a high rate of sickness and absence among nurses.

This has seen Queen’s consistently miss the Government target of seeing 95 per cent of A&E patients within four hours, with the rate dropping to 76 per cent at the start of October, despite little difference in the number of patients.

Last week trust staff were in India on a recruitment drive. However the number of senior clinicians is unlikely to ease until April due to candidates having to serve out notice periods.

Mark Smith, director of people development at Barking, Havering and Redbridge NHS trust, which runs the hospitals, said: “We are trying everything we can, both nationally and internationally.”

He admitted that the trust faced a second battle to retain consultants. Two candidates who had applied for new posts that would include a day a week at the world-leading trauma unit at the Royal London hospital in Whitechapel dropped out after getting other job offers.

The trust has received £3.7 million of extra funding from Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt to help it tackle winter A&E pressures and will try to reduce the time patients spend in hospital to free-up bed space.

It is partnering with UCL Partners and Barts Health in the hope of using their status to attract candidates to 10 fellowship and consultant posts. It is also considering whether to offer paramedics extra training. “We are looking at every single mechanism there is to keep these people here,” Mr Smith said.

Trust chairman Sir Peter Dixon said: “The performance over the last month is just a no-no. One way or another it has to be fixed.”

Leigh Malyon, the trust’s head of medical workforce, said: “There is a national shortage of A&E consultants, and like many other Trusts in the country, we are having to think of different ways of attracting high quality staff to our emergency departments.

“It has also been agreed, in line with national terms and conditions, that we can offer a recruitment premia to A&E consultants from January. This means we can offer an extra ten per cent on top of the basic starting salary. This additional money would be paid over the course of 12 months.

“We are hoping that – together with several other recruitment initiatives we have in place – this will boost the number of full-time, substantive A&E consultants at the trust, which in turn will help us to continue to improve patient care and experience.”

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