Employment and wellbeing support services have never been more critical in the fight to protect and retain senior doctors, the BMA’s consultants conference has heard.

Calls to improve psychological wellbeing and workplace rights and employment support services for consultants formed a central part of this year’s conference held this week at BMA House.

The event, which saw attendees debate on issues ranging from contractual negotiations and pay progression to the impact of corridor care on the NHS, saw consultants pass motions demanding the BMA fight to ensure that existing support structures not only be maintained but enhanced to meet the growing demands of the medical workforce.

In his opening address to Wednesday’s [4 March] conference, BMA consultants committee co-chair Shanu Datta warned that a ‘chronic workforce crisis’ in the NHS was damaging doctors’ physical and mental health and driving highly experienced and essential staff out of the health service.

He said: ‘Our value, as professionals and clinical leaders, and our autonomy have been eroded. Doctors are being substituted and side-lined.

‘The intensity and complexity of work we carry out daily have spiralled astronomically and are no longer safe or reasonable. We are gaslit and told to be resilient but given neither the conditions nor the support we need.

‘Is it any wonder we are exhausted, burned out, our own mental and physical health failing?’

Burnout

The extent of this epidemic of workplace pressure-driven burnout was highlighted by consultant psychiatrist Kathia Sullivan, who has extensive experience in treating fellow doctors whose mental health was suffering.

Dr Sullivan said that while timely, confidential and clinician specific psychological support had been shown to make a huge difference to supporting and retaining staff, these services were all too often limited in their availability due to cuts to staff wellbeing budgets, or replacement with ineffective ‘generic’ support services.

Calling on the BMA to press NHS employers to ensure that such support services were in line with the ‘principles and safeguards used by Practitioner Health’ and meeting national standards on ‘access, confidentiality and maximum waiting times’, Dr Sullivan warned that failing to do so would be putting the wider health service in jeopardy.

She said: ‘Protecting consultant psychological health is not indulgent, it is service continuity planning.

‘Evidence shows that when we when care is credential independent and clinician specific, doctors engage early, they recover sooner and they remain in work.

‘[However] Consultants will not access services if confidentiality is uncertain... many simply will stay silent until crisis hits, and crisis can be expensive and devastating.

She added: ‘If we are serious about retaining experienced consultants, then it is time that we invest.’

Investment call

Dr Sullivan’s plans were backed by consultant old age psychiatrist Lisa Beddoes who told the conference that ‘a health service that can’t take care of its staff can’t deliver to its patients’.

She said: ‘We all know colleagues in the medical profession who have at various times in their career experienced significant distress. Some have had to take time out through sickness. Some have left altogether or departed for foreign shores. Some have died.

‘Doctors deserve timely access to doctor-led support that is truly confidential [and] the NHS owes the profession this.’

The conference also saw senior doctors back calls for greater investment and support for BMA staff, describing the association workforce as ‘the backbone and guardians’ of all doctors’ rights.

The association should seek to increase the ranks of its regional staff and industrial relations officers (IROs) and provide additional investment to facilitate ongoing educational and campaigning opportunities for members, the BMA consultants conference heard today [4 March].

'Expert input'

In a motion which secured a two-thirds majority of conference attendees, doctors hailed the collaboration and support of BMA staff as having been and continuing to be critical to supporting the work of local medical committees in protecting doctors’ workplace terms and conditions.

The move comes at a time when the BMA is undertaking an organisational redesign of the association’s structures, as part of wider efforts to deliver its new five-year strategy which focusses on organising to win, campaigning to influence and enabling success.

Addressing the conference, Birmingham-based consultant radiologist Ian Barros D'Sa said that the ‘expert input’ of staff such as IROs had been invaluable in ensuring that doctors had not been reduced to working under ‘sweatshop’ conditions.

He said: ‘The support staff of the BMA who, together with LNCs, are the backbone and the effective guardians of terms and conditions for all doctors, including consultants.

‘If we did not have expert input from this skilled group of staff, we would be working as sweatshop forced labour instead of the skilled professionals that we are.

‘Support for this activity comes from the dedicated BMA staff who work hard and strive across this country for organising, union training, support, policies, provide employment and industrial relations support and many other areas.’

Staff support

He added: ‘If this group of staff are reduced or compromised in their activity, the BMA itself will be stymied as both a union and a professional institution for the benefit of its medical members and all others it serves.’

Backing the motion, consultant anaesthetist and BMA West Midlands regional consultants committee chair Rinesh Parmar said that behind every doctor’s defended employment contract or safeguarded terms and conditions was invariably a member of BMA staff.

He added that while he backed ongoing work to transform the BMA into an organising body, supporting members to achieve this ambition would require the continued support of ‘skilled staff’.

He said: ‘The BMA is rightly moving towards organising. Organising is not simply servicing, it’s not waiting for a problem to arise and then solving it; it’s building collective power in advance, it’s mobilising membership, it’s ensuring that when action is needed, we’re not scrambling to assemble members.

‘Organising does not happen by magic. It requires infrastructure, skilled staff and time.’

He added: ‘If [our] employers are coordinated and strategic, we must be more so. This motion recognises a simple truth. The BMA staff, who serve as guardians of our terms and conditions, must themselves be supported strength and expanded.

‘When our staff are supported, our LNCs are confident, when our LNCs are confident, our members are mobilised, and when our members are mobilised, our profession is protected.’

Appreciation on show

The motion, which was passed in full, followed on from the conference’s opening address by consultants committee co-chairs Shanu Datta and Helen Neary, in which Dr Neary paid fulsome tribute to the work of staff, contributions she described as having been instrumental in supporting her committee’s work over the past year.

She said: ‘We would like to say thank you to everyone who is giving their all to make our working lives better and more sustainable, the BMA staff we work with here supporting the consultant conference and consultant committee, wider staff teams in the BMA supporting our negotiations, policy work, media and communications; and a huge thanks to all the our brilliant IROs and those in member support working with all of us locally, with your LNCs and providing support to members directly when needed.’