Posts Tagged ‘Part-time’

Top five tips for successful part-time working

By Sue Robertson, chair of the BMA's Scottish Staff, Associate Specialists and Specialty Doctors Committee - 22nd October 2011 7:55 am

Doctors are becoming increasingly interested in the possibility of working part-time or flexibly as they look to achieving a better work-life balance. Employers may even be more supportive at present as they look to make cost savings. As someone who has worked part -time for a significant chunk of my career, I want to share some of the pros and cons.

From the outset it is important to dispel a few myths about part-time working. You don’t need to be female and you don’t need to have children to work part-time. If you can afford the drop in income and you have other things you want to do with your life, why not give it some thought?

Working part-time presents its own challenges. Often the times that your team wants you to be there are the busiest times. It is likely that you will try to be more efficient and to “fit more in” to the time you spend at work. You may well feel that you have to work more hours than your job plan allows. It is important that you get the balance right, so that you can continue to work in a professional manner whilst having some time away from work.

The key to successful part-time working is innovative job planning. I have an associate specialist job in which I am encouraged to cover the whole variety of my specialty of renal medicine. Clinically I am challenged daily by clinics, ward rounds, referrals from within the hospital and from my colleagues in primary care. In order to do that, I have had to become better at handover. There are some tests or results that will come back when I am not at work and I need to make sure that someone else knows to look out for them. I still feel uncomfortable doing that as within myself it feels like I am not completing the job but I need to ensure that care of the patient is continuous.

Working part-time should not prevent you advancing in your career. I have been encouraged to take leadership roles both regionally and nationally and this adds a great deal to my job satisfaction. You need to be proactive though - nobody will offer you things on a plate. You will need to give good reasoned argument as to why you should have time in your job plan to fulfil these roles. I would recommend that you strive for variety and challenge in your working life as an SAS doctor because the rewards of job satisfaction are great.

For the first time with the 2008 contract, our need for SPA time has been recognised. We will continue to argue that most SAS doctors have too little time allocated in their job plans for Supporting Professional Activities (SPA) work but it was a start. If your SPA allocation is too small you should address that in your annual appraisal. You need to speak up though. A well trained appraiser should be able to help you work out what to do about this common problem.

My tips for success in part time working are:

1. Continue to set yourself new challenges

2. Job-plan carefully

3. Always maintain a high level of professionalism

4. Ensure that you have regular satisfactory appraisal and set out a personal development plan for the coming year so that time can be allocated to your needs for personal and professional development.

5. Enjoy the time you spend out of work doing the other things that life has to offer. You will take that enthusiasm back into your clinical role too.

You can find more information about improving your work life balance on the BMA’s electronic handbook webpage, including case studies from many other SAS doctors who have taken up this option.

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Female doctors facing maternity leave pressure

By Mike Broad - 24th November 2010 9:57 am

Female doctors are being pressurised into cutting their maternity leaves short and prevented from working part-time when they return, the president of the Medical Women’s Federation has warned.

Dr Clarissa Fabre says, in a letter to The Guardian, that staff shortages are to blame following cut backs.

The GP says: “Women doctors now make up 58% of medical school intake. Some 43% of these doctors are under the age of 35; many will have children and will want to work part-time for a short period for reasons of childcare.

“With the present cuts in hospital funding, and the high cost of locums, colleagues are left to provide locum cover, often at very short notice and for little extra financial reward. Women consequently feel guilty when they take maternity leave, and feel they should return to work as early as possible. There is talk also of not allowing doctor parents to work part-time when their children are very young because of the shortage of doctors to cover the rotas.”

Her letter was prompted by the recent Royal College of Surgeons research which showed that the cost of hiring locums in the NHS is now topping £750m a year - following the introduction of a 48-hour week for juniors.

Fabre called for “urgent” action. “Astonishingly, there is talk of cuts in the number of junior doctors. The reason for this is that there are not enough consultant jobs available for those already coming through the system,” she said.

“So the chaos with hospital on-call cover will get worse, with gaps in rotas, insufficient suitably trained locums available, and existing doctors being asked to do more and more. We heard only recently of a young doctor left, unsupported, to cover too many patients, and being asked to do tasks beyond her level of competency. Not only is this bad for doctors, it is unacceptable for patients.”

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Us women have nothing to lose but our guilt

By Katherine Teale - 19th October 2009 10:43 am

I am sitting in Costa enjoying a quick cappuccino and doing what I do best - feeling guilty. I’m feeling guilty because it’s 4pm on a workday and I’m not at work. And I’m feeling guilty because I’m not with my daughter.

The fact is that being a female doctor is all about feeling guilty. Apparently we’re a ‘demographic time bomb’ because we all want to go part-time, added to which we don’t go into clinical leadership roles, and we reduce the standing of the profession. If I find this all a bit hard to take, it’s some consolation to know that I’m not alone (although that’s part of the problem, obviously) - medicine is now full of guilt-ridden women. 

Medical school intake is now 56% female, up from 24% in 1961. We were discussing this during my orthopaedic list this week (percentage of female surgeons in theatre 0%). I have to admit it doesn’t seem obvious to me why I should be responsible for reducing the status of medicine more than, say, Harold Shipman.

In my experience, medicine has become a much pleasanter profession to work in as the proportion of women has increased. When I started anaesthetics, in 1988, only two of the 12 trainees were female. In theatres, there were separate changing rooms for the female and male theatre staff, a palatially proportioned facility for the male doctors, but no changing room at all for the women doctors. 

The two of us had to use the cleaners’ changing room, which was the size of a small cupboard. Now, trusts are even having to provide special rooms for female doctors to express breast milk!

As to being part-time, I have to confess that when I first came back from maternity leave I worked a three-day week. But over the years it’s gradually crept back up to full time, mainly because of my pathetic inability to say “no”. I would be the first to admit there is a problem with part-time work and it’s this: once you’ve experienced life with less work, it becomes addictive. The less you do, the less you want to do.

Where once the odd half day off seemed like an unimaginable luxury, soon a four day week becomes an intolerable imposition on your time, and three days a week is only barely acceptable. I think the best arrangement would be to work just sufficient hours to break up the routine of lunches, tennis matches, manicures and whatever else non-working mothers fill their day with - perhaps about 15 hours a week.

Surely it’s not beyond the wit of the manpower (womanpower?) planners to factor all this in. We would still earn more than most of the population, and with current levels of unemployment the more jobs there are to go round the better.

So male doctors are going to find themselves in the minority - the good news for them is that there will always be plenty of jobs available in the fields to which they are perhaps more naturally suited (plumbing, car maintenance, etc).

Meanwhile, I’m going to stop feeling guilty every time I steal half an hour for myself, practise saying “no” when the trust piles on more work, and dream about the day when the poor old men have to get changed in the cleaning cupboard.

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