DOCTORS OUT OF WORK.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 29 March 1926, Page 5

DOCTORS OUT OF WORK.

ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND

SERIOUS POSITION DISCLOSED.

Two thousand young doctors, men and women, are looking for medical employment in England and Scotland and. cannot find it. That figure is the estimate of the agents in. London, who find their offices haunted, day after day, by .physicians and surgeons who are seeking any sort of professional position that is not too baclly paid. “Where before the war I would have 100 assistantships and ‘locum®’ to be filled. I now have 20,” said one of the chief medical agents. “The number of applicants has increased by 25 per cent. “I scarcely like to think of what may happen to all young women doctors who come to me. There is no possibe chance for them. Quite a number must, I think, take other employment. “Salaries offered to medical assistants are scandalously low. Four pounds a week, with all found, is quite the common wage for a. man who may have spent £2OOO on qualifying, and be perfectly efficient. “I have even had situations taken at £3 a. week by women doctors.” One of the reasons which causes congestion in the medical profession is the inflow of doctors from the Irish Free State who can find no opening in their own country and so ‘ look to England for their careers. Another factor is that doctors in established practices now hand their patients over to fellow practitioners in the same district when they go on holidays or are ill, rather than employ locum tenens. “There is certainly a surplus of doctors at the present time,” said an official of the British Medical Association, “and the surplus is greatest with the women. “Conditions are righting themselves, however, as many fewer students are entering the meclica.l schools, and in the course of a few years the supply will not exceed the demand.”