ABSTRACT
Introduction Doctors who have chosen to work in secondary care have found that there has been little choice in the working patterns available, particularly if they aspired to a career as a consultant in a hospital specialty. This is no different from similarly driven people in other careers such as law, advertising and banking. The NHS, when it launched the ‘Improving Working Lives’ initiative in 2000, acknowledged that changing the culture where working long hours was the benchmark would not only improve recruitment and retention but would result in a happier more effective workforce.1 Cohort studies in the past have indicated that, although a smaller proportion of doctors in secondary care elected to work part-time compared with general practice, this proportion was not insignificant and was rising.2’3 A more recent cohort study indicated that the vast majority of female respondents (94%) either currently work less than full-time or may do so in the future, compared with 46% of male doctors in the same cohort.4
