Achi news desk-
Speaking to the online conference on Priorities for Cancer Provision in Scotland, Dr Yuille noted that “no one had applied” for the vacant post after she left her role in the Breast Unit Edinburgh in NHS Lothian earlier this year despite its high status. centre.
He added that around one applicant per consultant level oncology vacancy has been in Scotland over the past decade, with a UK-wide median age of 54 for consultant oncologists retiring from the NHS.
READ MORE:
Dr Yuille said: “When we asked what might have encouraged them to stay on longer, there were things like more flexibility, better IT, better administrative support, and having kinder working environments.
“In some hospitals they can’t even get food and hot drinks during shifts – basic things.
“We need a real people-centred view of how we look after our workforce.”
He added that it was “unsustainable” that most consultant oncologists in Scotland are on 9:1 contracts – meaning 90% of their working time is spent on clinical work, with only 10% dedicated to train junior doctors or in service areas. improvement.
This is in contrast to the NHS in other parts of the UK, where the time allocated to non-clinical duties is more generous, says Dr Yuille.
He pointed to the findings of the latest workforce census carried out by RCR which predicts that by 2027 Scotland will have a 22% shortfall in oncologists, compared to need.
NHS Scotland currently has around 150 clinical and medical oncologists but 15 more are now needed “to start providing effective care”.
However, the oncology workforce grew by just 1% in 2022, Dr Yuille said, compared to 5% for the UK as a whole.
“It’s not going in the right direction at all,” he said, adding: “As a group of clinical oncologists, we’re not coping very well.
“We’re stressed, burnt out.
“I don’t think Covid has helped, but I think you can see from those numbers that we are working as hard as we can and some of us can’t work harder than us, and I guess that what is being asked of us is. too much.”
Regional variations in staffing were also highlighted, with conference data showing that there are only 4.9 oncologists for every 100,000 over-50s in the northern Scotland cancer network region compared to 9.1 per 100,000 in the south-east region – which includes Edinburgh.
Despite the growing demand for cancer services, Dr Yuille said it was very difficult to attract enough young doctors to oncology training positions.
The expansion of oncology training posts is part of the Scottish Government’s cancer strategy, published last year, but Dr Yuille said fill rates had been “extremely low”.
In 2023, the conference was told that only five out of 18 Level Three specialist training posts in clinical oncology had been filled, and only one junior doctor had been appointed to the four available training placements in oncology medical.
Dr Yuille added that figures updated over the weekend indicated that the cancer centers in Glasgow and Edinburgh had filled the remaining places for trainees, but that Dundee had filled just one of its four slots and Aberdeen had being unsuccessful in recruiting to any of the remaining five. places under training.
Dr Yuille said: “Young doctors are going elsewhere. The training programs they follow are difficult, and quite a few of them drop out.
“And there are quite large bottlenecks in the training program…there has been no good thought about the pull through to specialties such as oncology.”
He added that the shortage of other healthcare professionals is also having a big impact.
“We have to think much more broadly than doctors, because nurses, radiographers, clinical scientists – we need all of these people to support the cancer pathway.
“At one point, one of the cancer centers could barely provide chemotherapy because they had no nurses.”
Professor David Morrison, director of the Scottish Cancer Registry at Public Health Scotland, noted that although survival rates are improving, Scotland and the rest of the UK tend to have worse outcomes than similar countries.
However, he told delegates that more work was needed to analyze how much this was due to longer waiting times or the case mix of cancer patients.
Professor Morrison said: “One of the paradoxes we see when we look at treatment information: the simple description of how long patients wait from an initial GP referral and then their survival and other outcomes, is that the longer the you will wait – generally. – the better your survival will be.
“This paradox of waiting times is because patients are managed in a way that reflects their urgency of need: the sickest patients are seen the fastest, but because they are sick their outcomes are” n tend to be worse.
“So simple descriptions of cancer waiting times do not necessarily shed light on the impact of waiting times.
“What we need to do is adjust for and better understand how sick patients are at the start of that journey in order to try to better understand how much – and in some cases if at all – the impact of waiting times on outcomes. ”
