Consultants' hours of work: a new perspective

doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7526.1205-a

BMJ 2005;331:1205 (19 November), doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7526.1205-a

Letter

Consultants' hours of work: a new perspective

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—An estimated 6000 consultant years would be lostto the NHS if consultants exercised their (agreed) option ofretiring at 60.¹ I calculated the hours I worked as a traineebetween 1982 and 1991, working on-call rotas of between 1:2and 1:5. I then calculated the hours I have worked as a consultantfrom 1991 to date, taking into account the extra hours I wasrequired to spend on-call in the hospital for the two yearsit took to "normalise" out of hours service commitments afterthe introduction of the Calman reforms to doctors' training.I have assumed five weeks' holiday a year over the whole period.

A 40 hour week (allowing five weeks' holiday) equates to 1880hours per year (one "standard" year). As a trainee I workedjust over 34 000 hours. Many of these hours worked (around 50%)were paid at the old pre-Calman rate . . . [Full text of this article]

Austin A Leach, consultant anaesthetist

Royal Liverpool University Hospital, Liverpool L7 8XP austin.leach@rlbuht.nhs.uk