Rural Scotland’s ongoing medical recruitment crisis is to be tackled under an innovative scheme allowing doctors in the Highlands to swap work with their Central Belt counterparts. This allows island doctors to work and improve on their skills by working longer hours in the city. Many city doctors will also have an idea about what problems the rural areas are facing. For more information on medical jobs check out nursing jobs in uae.
The move hopes to encourage more medics to be concerned with the problems in the rural area. The project is being piloted by the Western Isles Hospital in Stornoway and Yorkhill in Glasgow. There is a locum pediatrician in Stornoway, is presently spending a week in Yorkhill to study about the problems the have there.
Each doctor can take part in this project which runs for about eight weeks. Most consultants and other senior staff prefer not to work in the rural areas which make them feel isolated. In this project the rural doctors will get the chance to rest from a pressured schedule from the communities by working less in the city.
The problem of recruitment in rural areas is threatening the future of many specialist services. At the Western Isles Hospital half of the consultant are locums, some short term ones have earned over GBP11,000 a week. Averagely the locum bill of this hospital is about GBP1.5 million a year. To read other medical jobs articles make sure to visit medical jobs new zealand.
A pediatrician decided to pull out of retirement after 20 years at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, Britain’s largest children’s hospital. His good heard worked until the new system is in place He stated that he does not believe that people are prepared to accept that any longer. More consultant services will disappear if this project was not made.
One pediatrician will have to deal with a lot of patients. A pediatrician cannot handle about 5,000 children In the Western Isles. 200 emergency admissions to the children’s ward happen each year. By contrast, Yorkhill will deal with that in a week.
In reality the hospital has six children’s beds and the number of births is also expected to drop from around 200 a year now to 150 over the next decade. The future for remote and rural areas does depend on a managed clinical network with a mainland center.
In fact they have started negotiations with Yorkhill and would hope the system will be in place by the end of the year says the pediatrician. The upside to this project is that the doctor can improve his skills, the patient will benefit from that and will keep the consultants in remote areas. For specialist medicine in remote and rural areas this is what will happen next.
Apparently the doctor said she does not believe that such jobs will be viable without the new system in place. Consequently she also mentioned that advertisements for recruitments will not help unless the systems are in place. She evens mentioned that if they do not go ahead with the new system they will be sending three times as many children to the mainland for treatment, a move that has big cost implications.