Emergency medicine doctors should have “fair equality of leisure time” to compensate for unsociable hours, College of Emergency Medicine says

Abstract

Doctors working in emergency medicine should have a “fair equality of leisure and family time” to compensate for night, evening, and weekend work, the College of Emergency Medicine has said. Speaking at the college’s conference earlier this month, Kevin Reynard, its vice president of the college, said that efforts to boost the total number of doctors working in the specialty needed to focus on retention. “It is clear that the issue isn’t about recruiting people into the specialty,” he said. “The issue is about retaining them once they get there.” Reynard said that developing “equitable terms and conditions” would be key to this. “This isn’t just going to happen by crossing our fingers and hoping,” he said. “We need to change the way we work and the conditions that people work in so we don’t drive people away.” He said that the organisations that would need to be involved in implementing such developments already acknowledged that changes had to …