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Retired doctors will be supported to remain in the workforce and consultant time for education and training will be protected in new plans from NHS England to tackle the backlog in elective care.
The plans were detailed in a letter to NHS trusts in England yet the British Medical Association said it was disappointed that this letter fails to mitigate the punitive pension taxation that are “driving experienced and much needed doctors away in their droves”.
It said that while it recognises that it will be extremely challenging to provide care to the large numbers of patients who had it delayed by the pandemic, the fact is that there simply aren’t enough doctors.
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Dr Vishal Sharma, BMA consultants committee chair, said: “What’s worse is that the doctors we have are exhausted, burned out and demoralised. They gave their all during the pandemic and are now facing the secondary challenge of tackling the enormous waiting lists.
“This letter to NHS trusts in England does make some helpful suggestions, many of which the BMA has previously called for. It is particularly important that time to support professional activities should be protected so that consultants can lead service improvements, and support education and training. The recognition that doctors who are either approaching retirement age or have recently retired should be supported to remain in the workforce by allowing them working to work differently and more flexibly in the later stages of their career is welcome and long overdue.
“However, it is extremely disappointing that this letter fails to mitigate the punitive pension taxation that we know is driving experienced and much needed doctors away in their droves.”
We do not have enough doctors to tackle the backlog
He added that NHS England continues to reference the pension support and information that it is providing to the NHS workforce, despite the BMA repeatedly highlighting that the information it has been publishing on its website is misleading and inaccurate.
“Today we have written to NHSEI again to ask it to correct the information on its website, and, as well as ensuring the information it provides to NHS staff is accurate, it must take meaningful steps to fix the problem. These include immediately mandating the recycling of the full value of employers’ pension contributions for affected staff and supporting the BMA’s call for a tax unregistered pension scheme, similar to the one the Government introduced for the judiciary.” he added.
“The pandemic has laid bare the fact that we do not have enough doctors and to ensure that we can not only overcome the huge pressures we now face but to ensure we are better equipped to deal with future pandemics, the government must commit to appropriately increasing the size of the workforce. The forthcoming government-commissioned workforce strategy must lay out a clear plan to achieve this, including regular assessments and projections of future needs, rather than try to simply put pressure on the exhausted medical teams we have to do more.”