BRITISH DOCTORS

Southland Times, Issue 22157, 27 October 1933, Page 4

BRITISH DOCTORS

MANY IN SORE STRAITS. HARD TO MAKE A LIVING. Doctors in Britain are finding it very difficult to make their professions pay. At the last degree ceremony at Edinburgh University 130 new doctors were “capped,” and about the same time 25 others received the licence of the Triple Qualification. To-day these 155 highly trained and fully-qualified physicians are looking for work—and very few of them are finding it. After spending five of the best years of their lives studying medicine these doctors are now members of a profession in which many of those already practising are having the greatest difficulty to make ends meet.

"Two thirds of the maternity work of the country is new done by midwives, school doctors look after the children, and many of the non-panel patients are non-paying patients as well,” a doctor said recently. “While doctors with large panels may be doing very well out of National Health Insurance work, others, with smaller lists, are not doing much more than pay their way. In order to be on the panel we have to incui’ many expenses, surgery rent, taxes, lighting, heating, and attendant’s wages, which we had no call to meet in the past. These expenses eat up anything from 20 per cent to 60 per cent of our insurance cheques. “Up till a few years ago, most of us found, our ready-cash consultations and visits brought us in sufficient to meet all our bills for each week. To-day, for every 10/- we spend we have to draw on our savings for five. It would stagger people if they knew the difficulty we have in gathering in our accounts.

“Recently, four of us happened to meet on a Thursday night. For that week, up till then, we had not drawn a couple of pounds between us. You cannot go far on a holiday for that! “Yes, and it is the people owing us money who, on return from their own holidays—taken at our expense—are the first to send for us and to grouse if we are not on their doorsteps almost before they have got back from the telephone call-box!”