20 March 2019

A team of clinicians from SaTH will be travelling to India and Dubai this week in a bid to recruit up to 20 new A&E doctors.

The group of four medical staff will be interviewing candidates during the six-day trip for positions within the Emergency Departments (EDs) at the Princess Royal Hospital (PRH) in Telford and the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital (RSH).

It is hoped that they will be able to recruit substantive middle grade doctors and consultants to help fill the vacancies within the EDs.

SaTH is working with a specialist recruitment company which has helped other Trusts in the UK secure clinical staff from overseas, and it will be the first time that the Trust has sent staff to Dubai and India to interview and recruit staff.

Dr Jenni Rowlands, Director of Postgraduate Education at SaTH, is part of the team travelling to Dubai and India. She said: “This is the first time that we have been overseas to recruit like this. We are hoping that the trip will be a successful one for the Trust, and that we will be able to make job offers whilst we are there.”

Simon Wright, Chief Executive at SaTH, said: “This is a really exciting opportunity for us to be able to recruit the staff that we need to what is still a very fragile service.

“Whilst we managed to recruit enough middle grade doctors to keep the A&E at PRH open 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week at the end last year, they were a mixture of locum and agency staff. We are still considerably short of the substantive staff that we need to support our current teams.

“We have not stopped working behind-the-scenes to recruit to our EDs and we are leaving no stone unturned. We are hoping that this trip to India and Dubai will give us a real chance of securing staff into those substantive roles.

“With the reconfiguration of our hospitals now a reality, as well as all the efforts that are ongoing to make Trust an attractive place to work, we hope that this will further help our ability to recruit the ED doctors that we need to work in our Trust for the benefit of our patients.”

The Trust’s EDs currently have seven substantive consultants, two locum consultants with another due to join next month; and 14 substantive middle grade doctors and 10 locum middle grade doctors.

Another team from SaTH is also heading to Dublin at the end of the month to recruit qualified nurses to work in a number of departments across the Trust.

As well as the overseas recruitment drive, the Trust is working on a number of initiatives to improve its offer to emergency medicine doctors including The Clinical Fellowship Programme and the CESR CESR (Certificate of Eligibility for Specialist Registration) scheme which are being developed jointly with Wolverhampton University.

Work has also begun on creating a new doctors’ mess within the PRH and six houses to accommodate junior doctors are being refurbished thanks to a DIY SOS-style appeal led by Telford & Wrekin Council.

ENDS