The Telegraph has this today, “Patients face a significant increase in waiting times for operations as 'insane' European rules mean doctors' hours are cut so much medics will not be able to cope, surgeons have warned.”
Labour has been boasting, as have the trusts about reducing waiting times about the majority of patients are treated within the target of 18 weeks from seeing their GP.
However this will be reversed as junior doctors will be limited to working a 48-hour week, from their current 56 hours, it is claimed.
Labour has been boasting, as have the trusts about reducing waiting times about the majority of patients are treated within the target of 18 weeks from seeing their GP.
However this will be reversed as junior doctors will be limited to working a 48-hour week, from their current 56 hours, it is claimed.
“The extension of the European Working Time Directive will effectively result in the loss of thousands of doctor shifts, John Black, President of the Royal College of Surgeons said.
And the Government fears there will be a lack of locum doctors available to step in and help fill the gaps, following changes in doctors' recruitment.
It means patients will have to wait months for routine operations as surgeons prioritise emergencies rather than scheduled cases.
The Royal College of Surgeons wants trainee surgeons on a 65-hour working week in order to produce safe, properly trained doctors and cover the workload required by hospitals.
Mr Black said: "If the 48 hour limit is enforced, surgeons will have to make a hard choice
between caring for emergency cases and dealing with elective cases as there will not be the time available to do both. Surgeons will put patient safety first and focus on looking after emergency patients.”
The shake-up of doctors' training, which caused a fiasco in 2007, means more trainees are in longer-term posts so there are now fewer candidates looking for locum posts and temporary jobs.
Remedy UK, the junior doctors pressure group, has calculated that switching all juniors from a 56 hour to a 48 hour working week is the equivalent of losing one working day per doctor per week, or up to 70,000 doctor days per week across the UK.
Dr Matt Jameson Evans, co-founder of Remedy UK, said: "In many key specialties the system is already massively overstretched.
The Department of Health wants to delay the introduction of a 48-hour week for some specialities and is expecting an answer from the European Commission by the end of May. However this would only mean some doctors could remain on 56 hours until 2012 and will not solve the problem in the long-run, experts have said.
A spokesman for the Department of Health said: "Most UK doctors in training already comply with the Working Time Directive, and the overwhelming majority will do so by 1st August this year. However, we have notified the European Commission that we intend to operate a derogation for a small number of services involved in delivering urgent and emergency patient care."
Come on Gov grow some balls and tell the EU where it can poke its “working time directive”
“Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavours to live at the expense of everybody else.” Frederic Bastiat
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