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Enhancing quality: Promoting consultant expansion across the NHS

Consultants across the UK strive to deliver the highest quality care for patients, but are constantly battling with severe pressures to produce the improvements they know are possible. Consultants have the highest level of training and ability across the medical and surgical specialties. Consultants also provide the leadership and innovation that pushes forward the boundaries of care available for patients. Furthermore they teach and train new doctors and other clinicians in the health service and also develop the research base that is the life blood of the future of the service.

There is now increasing clinical evidence that in many areas of medical practice there is a need to increase the number of consultants available to treat patients. This is over and above the expansion in consultant numbers which has taken place previously. The financial pressures of the recent past have produced an artificial freeze on necessary consultant expansion in many areas and this is now beginning to impede improvements in the quality of patient care.

In this document (published in April and updated in June 2008), we highlight the clear evidence where appointing new consultants will enhance the quality, speed and safety of care for patients.

This evidence shows the need to expand consultant numbers in many specialities including:

• Acute medicine
• Emergency Medicine
• Intensive Care Medicine
• Paediatrics
• Obstetrics
• Plastic surgery
• Trauma and Orthopaedic surgery
• Head and Neck surgery
• Pathology
• Radiology

As we enter a new financial year, with the many parts of the NHS in better financial shape and with the service as a whole £1.8 billion in surplus, we believe that resources are available to fund this expansion. There are also many trained and available doctors at, or coming towards, the end of their training willing and able to compete for and take up these posts. We should bring the full force of their abilities and training to bear on enhancing the quality of care for patients.

Consultants bring high quality and high value to healthcare. Some of the evidence for this is given below. This short-term expansion of numbers is not only possible, but necessary for patients. Each and every hospital should be urgently reviewing their workforce plans. Trusts in England should begin work with their PCT colleagues to enable this expansion to start now.

Download the evidence document in PDF format using the link on the right.