By Marjory Inglis, health reporter

TAYSIDE’S TOP NHS managers have no idea how many hours local hospital doctors are spending doing private work, potentially leaving them over tired on duty.

A deal that limits consultants’ NHS working hours, while boosting their salaries will cost NHS Tayside more than £8 million a year in addition to the previous cost of consultants’ pay.

Last year consultants got a major hike in their NHS salaries, while limits were placed on their working hours, partly to reduce the risk of over tired doctors working in wards and operating theatres. The majority of Tayside consultants now earn a basic NHS salary of £88,000, though many get twice as much when “merit awards” funded by the NHS are added.

Despite these huge earnings some doctors choose to work additional hours seeing private patients, and there are no formal restraints or limits on that work.

Consultants are under no obligation to tell their NHS employers how many hours they spend doing private work in Fernbrae Hospital, Dundee, and elsewhere.

While NHS employers cannot ask the majority of staff to work longer than 48 hours a week, there is no ban on doctors doing private work, putting in extra hours before returning to NHS hospitals.

Mr Mike Lyall, medical director of NHS Tayside’s acute services division based at Ninewells Hospital, Dundee, yesterday admitted that he and his management colleagues did not track consultants’ private work. Consultants were obliged to inform NHS employers they intended to undertake private work but not how much time they intended to spend doing that work.

“There is a code of practice in the terms and conditions of the new consultants’ contract which obliges them to inform us if they intend to do private practice,” said Mr Lyall. “We get a letter from them saying they intend to do private practice and that is filed in their personal files.”

He said it would be quite a lot of work to “trawl” the personal files of more than 300 consultants working in Tayside’s NHS hospitals to establish how many also did private work and that would not reveal the amount of work being done in addition to a consultant’s NHS work.

“What I don’t know is how much they are working privately. All I would know is that they are doing their clinics, seeing their out-patients and operating as we have contracted them to do, but what I couldn’t tell you, and we don’t monitor, is what they do in the private sector.”

Mr Lyall was unable to say if doctors’ clinical performance in the private sector was independently monitored but he was adamant that if anything “went wrong” while an NHS doctor was working privately, he would expect to be told.

“If something goes wrong there (in a private hospital), they would be obliged to let us know,” said Mr Lyall.

He explained that the consultants’ contract was being widely discussed locally and nationally. Basically it would appear that more tweaking of the contract will come to ensure that the significant extra investment from the NHS pays dividends for the patients. And that might mean keeping tabs on the amount of hours doctors spend doing private work.

“That is something we will maybe need to look at,” said Mr Lyall. “If you gave me a consultant’s name, I would not know how much private work he did.”