Medical Council report highlights dangerous and stressful working hours of country's doctors
A new report from the Medical Council published today has outlined dangerous hours and high-stress environment that the country's youngest doctors endure.
The finding demonstrates the upward trend of doctor emigration to health systems in other countries.
One of the key issues driving emigration is the long and unsafe working hours in hospitals across Ireland.
Over a third (33.5%) of trainee doctors surveyed during the 2017 'Your Training Counts' report said that they worked in excess of 60 hours or more in a typical week.
Just under half of all respondents (47.8%) who showed signs of having a mental health issue that would benefit from additional support were involved in an adverse event.
Two in five trainees reported instances of bullying, and more than half reported that they had seen a colleague harassed or bullied.
While other results point to a positive training experience for many of our medical trainees, the IMO has said that the data collated "should serve as a wake-up call to policy-makers, and act as an impetus to tackle not just our medical recruitment crisis but also our often hidden retention crisis".
Commenting on the report, Irish Medical Organisation President Dr Padraig McGarry said:
“The recruitment emergency in our hospitals is very worrying, and we are now seeing the knock-on effects – with far too many doctors working unsafe hours, a growing mental health crisis, and incidences of bullying that are having a lasting effect on our younger doctors and resulting in far too many adverse events taking place.”
This unacceptable working environment – exacerbated by a huge 30% pay disparity between Consultants appointed before and after 2012 – is unquestionably having a negative effect on our ability to retain our doctors in Ireland.
“While this report is very valuable, it is not telling us anything new and we must now as a health service make positive changes to support and encourage our younger doctors.
"Government have long been aware of the chronic retention problem in our services, yet they continue to ignore the problem which has the inevitable consequences that we in the IMO have warned of repeatedly.”
