GPs paid to £100 an hour to work in local A&E department

August 15, 2016

Holidays meant Ipswich Hospital was unable to staff itself at the weekend
Urgent appeal was sent out by its CCG to ensure a safe level of cover
Predicted to be busier than ever but was only slightly above average
Hospital filled gaps in the rota by offering £1,200 for a 12 hour shift

Stephen Matthews For Mailonline

Published:
11:05 EST, 15 August 2016

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Updated:
13:07 EST, 15 August 2016

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A desperate hospital trust paid local GPs £100 an hour to work in its AE this weekend due to a staffing crisis.

Holidays and gaps in the rota meant Ipswich Hospital was unable to provide a safe level of cover.

Hospital officials had predicted it to be one of the busiest weekends of the year and issued a last minute cry for help from local doctors.

Last week, the Ipswich and East Suffolk Clinical Commissioning Group sent an email to local GPs offering the three-figure hourly sum.

The move is one of many measures hospitals are taking to cope with soaring demand and a lack of staff.

Holidays and gaps in the rota meant Ipswich Hospital was unable to provide a safe level of cover this weekend. As a result, local GPs were offered £100 an hour to come in and work

Figures released last week revealed the number of patients attending AE departments in England rose by 2.1 per cent over the past year, with 1,951,000 people treated.

Emergency admissions were also up year on year, rising 4.7 per cent to 480,210.

And this June was recorded as the busiest since current NHS records began.

Waiting-times for planned operations, ambulance response times and delayed discharge targets were also missed.

Nearly 15 per cent of people in larger AE departments and one in ten patients in all hospitals are not being treated within four hours, according to statistics for June.

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The situation is so bad that some hospitals have been forced to slash services.

Chorley Hospital in Lancashire was last week forced to downgrade its AE to an urgent care centre because it did not have enough medics.

United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs the AE at Grantham and District Hospital as well as two others in the region, said it had been ‘seriously affected’ by a ‘national shortage of appropriately trained doctors to work in AEs’.

Yesterday a spokeswoman for Ipswich Hospital confirmed GPs had been asked to work – adding there was no shortage of volunteers wanting to earn £1,200 for a 12 hour shift.

Speaking yesterday, a hospital spokesperson told the Ipswich Star there were no shortage of volunteers wanting to earn £1,200 for a 12 hour shift

Jan Ingle told theIpswich Star: ‘While we have been busy we are coping very well.

‘There were 272 attendances to the department on Saturday, which is just slightly above the average of 250.

‘The main thing is they were brilliant and we had a fully staffed, safe emergency department over the weekend to care for everyone.’

A CCG spokesman said: ‘The summer holiday season is always a busy time for the department and we were more than happy to ask our GP colleagues to help out.

‘Local GPs have volunteered their services as an additional resource to deal with those patients arriving with minor illness and injury.’

WHAT’S CAUSING THE STAFFING CRISIS

A widening gap between the supply and demand for emergency doctors is leading to a crisis in AE departments across the country.

Dr Clifford Mann, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said: ‘The great efforts made by doctors and nurses to help patients in under-resourced locations sometimes is not sustainable.

‘As well as potentially putting patient safety at risk, placing an ever increasing workload on overstretched staff can create a vicious circle in retention and recruitment with many overworked trainees simply choosing to leave the country or indeed the specialty altogether.

‘The wider picture is there is a real crisis in emergency medicine as our workforce numbers are not growing fast enough to keep pace with rising numbers of patients attending AE Departments.’

The hospital’s deputy chief executive Neill Moloney added: ‘Our first priority is to ensure that we provide safe care to all our patients and so we have asked other doctors working within the system whether they are available to provide cover.

‘With the support of local medical staff colleagues we have been able to fill the rota.’

Many staffing agencies offer doctors rates of up to £150 an hour – equivalent to £1,800 for a 12-hour shift – and allow them to work whenever they want.

Others throw in a free iPad if they sign up or a £1,000 bonus for referring one of their doctor friends.

Meanwhile figures published last year revealed locum and agency staff were being extortionate amounts.

The NHS has recommended pay rates, set out by the National Framework Agreement.

But locums were typically being paid in excess of those figures, deemed the best possible value for money.

Charges for consultants in AE represented a ‘major misalignment to NFA rates’, the report found.

Hourly pay rates were an average of £90.40, reaching highs of £140 an hour, compared with the NFA’s recommended rate of £64.73.

Rates as high as £150 were paid to consultant radiologists, while filling consultant vacancies in under-pressure AE departments cost as much as £140.

Meanwhile consultants in general medicine could command as much as £133 per hour.