It will not be safe to be ill.
utterly lunatic rules being applied to doctors in training to ensure
- it seems - that when they actually get to a patient they are half-
trained and incompetent at their jobs.
What are even worse than the lunatic nature of the policy are the
pathetic and insulting government excuses for wrecking the medicine
on which we all depend.
In the end it is our government working through our permanent
representatives in Brussels who cause this - NOT THE EU. These
representatives, mostly on secondment from the Foreign Office,
continually sell Britain short. If the German government has
permission for its surgeons to work 60 hours - why don’t British ones?
I repeat that in about 15 years time it will not be safe or sensible
to get ill. What have " 'elf and safety' got to say about it?"
xxxxxxxxxxxx cs
==============================
TELEGRAPH 11.4.09
I'd like my surgeon to have practised on people first
The European Working Time Directive will prevent surgeons being
trained properly, says Vicki Woods
My north Oxford friend is recovering well from an operation on her
spine six weeks ago. The consultant orthopaedic surgeon told her it
would take an hour; it took four and a half. She was impressed with
his quality of care, as was I.
On August 1, the final round of the European Working Time Directive
(EWTD) will make it illegal for surgeons, along with all NHS
employees – indeed, any employees – to work more than 48 hours a
week. According to John Black, president of the Royal College of
Surgeons (RCS), this will be "disastrous" for training – especially
since the 48 hours includes time spent asleep when on-call at the
hospital. Mr Black wants surgeons to be opted out of the European
directive. He thinks working 65 hours a week (asleep or awake) is
more like it.
My friend's surgeon is (she guesses) in his fifties, so he will have
had approximately 36,000 hours of hands-on experience before he
became a consultant. Younger surgeons-in-training will have had far
fewer. One of my favourite websites, nhsblogdoc.com, suggests that
8,000 hours' experience will be the norm. Nhsblogdoc.com is cross,
and no wonder. If a surgeon were to cut me open, I know which level
of experience I'd prefer.
There was an Opposition debate about the directive on March 10, in
which Dr Richard Taylor (the independent MP who ran on Keep
Kidderminster Hospital Open) said: "Unless one does enough cutting,
one does not become a good surgeon. It is experience of operations
that counts." He did his appendectomies in the middle of the night,
he said, "with a very good senior house officer holding my hand".
The Secretary of State for Health said that working longer hours "did
not necessarily mean better training" and anyway, only very urgent
surgery is carried out in the dead of night. "Surgery is a technical
skill," he said, knowledgeably, and "developments in new technology,
such as virtual reality surgical simulators, mean that there is
increasingly and thankfully less need for inexperienced trainee
surgeons to practise their skills directly on patients". [Can he not
be arrested for attempted murder ? -cs]
Virtual reality simulators? Crikey. I'd want my surgeon to have
"practised his skills" by cutting open enough people in actuality. To
readers who agree, I suggest 1) making sure your surgeon is over 50,
and 2) signing the
e-petition to the Government that asks for surgeons to be opted out
of the EWTD. Ben Cresswell, the petition's progenitor, is a past
president of the Association for Surgeons in Training.
It probably won't work, because the Government can't or won't make
Europe work, even though Germany allows surgeons a 60-hour week. But
there's only 3,000-odd signatures on it. Three million might
concentrate Alan Johnson's mind about what makes a surgeon.
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