Locums make up a fifth of doctors in emergency units at weekends
BMJ 2013; 346 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.f1065 (Published 15 February 2013) Cite this as: BMJ 2013;346:f1065- Adrian O’Dowd
- 1London
A locum company has warned that the NHS will not be able to continue with what it says is a “chronic” shortage of doctors working in hospital emergency departments.
HCL Workforce Solutions, a commercial provider of healthcare professionals to the NHS, said that acute care hospital trusts in England were facing a dangerous combination of factors that were undermining their ability to maintain sufficient emergency services and called for a long term radical review of emergency medical staffing.
In a report the company said that each month its medical locum division, HCL Doctors, received an average of 3200 requests for a locum doctor from NHS emergency departments–the highest number of requests from any specialty and accounting for more than 40% of all requests.1
The report used data from the HCL Doctors division, …
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