News / NHS seeking GPs for Yell and Unst practices
NHS SHETLAND is publicising a trio of GP vacancies in Yell and Unst as it seeks to attract doctors to fill roles that have been carried out by locums since the autumn.
The local health board has had difficulties filling a variety of posts in recent years, but GP surgeries where doctors effectively have to be on call around the clock have tended to prove particularly challenging.
NHS Shetland’s primary care manager Lisa Watt explained that a “fair amount of work” has been carried in an effort to make the posts as attractive as possible.
Both full and part-time GP posts are available in Unst, while there is also a full-time vacancy in Yell, and the health board has increased the pay scale and bolstered the level of support for doctors working in the isolated health centres.
With no ferry transport available between the islands overnight, both islands provide their own out-of-hours service 24/7, 365 days a year. The GPs are on call on evenings and weekends, with only the part-time posts allowing them some time off.
“The Unst posts have been vacant since August,” Watt told Shetland News. “The full time vacancy in Yell, that’s been vacant since September. At the moment we’re covering those vacancies with locums, and trying to keep to the same locums – we have a small pool of them – to try and have some continuity.”
She said NHS Shetland had also looked at what was done in other areas, in particular Orkney which has “a very successful GP staffing model for outer islands”.
It brought in a video and telephone conference to allow GPs in the islands to get together and discuss particular incidents, things they have learned and to provide one another with support.
Watt said she was confident the posts would be filled, and is encouraging people in Shetland to share links through the health board’s Facebook page. The jobs will also be advertised nationally in the British Medical Journal for three weeks from Saturday.
Ideally NHS Shetland would like to attract people willing to move to Shetland, but “we’ve got to be pragmatic and if folks would prefer a part-time post here and a part-time post on the mainland, we’ll do what we can to accommodate that”.
A GP in Mid Yell will be catering for around 1,200 patients and one in Baltasound will be responsible for around 600, and Watt said there were elements of the job that do appeal to a certain type of person.
“Some people actually really like that part of medicine because you’re the one that’s there, you’re in charge, you’re seeing patients all the way through,” she said.
“It does attract a specific type of individual. Orkney, for the past six years, every time has managed to recruit. I’m really hopeful we’ll be able to recruit as well.”
In all there are 14 vacancies advertised on NHS Shetland’s website, including major posts such as medical director, head of mental health, two physiotherapists and a consultant physician.
While some of those are newly available, director of community health and social care Simon Bokor-Ingram acknowledged others were posts “we’ve been trying hard to fill for a period of time”.
He told BBC Radio Shetland on Tuesday that there were “well-known challenges” both locally and nationally in recruiting and “GPs are one of the professions where we are struggling”.
“Whilst we do have ongoing challenges with recruitment, particularly to some key posts,” he said, “I think that the strength is we’re thinking about how we redesign jobs and redesign teams and we’re mindful of all of the aspects that make Shetland an attractive place to come and work and live.”
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