Cash lures civilian medics to front line
By Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent, Sunday Telegraph
Civilian doctors and nurses are being offered up to six-figure salaries to work in British military hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Faced with a chronic lack of front-line medical staff, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) is offering consultant physicians and surgeons, hired on short-term contracts, up to the equivalent of £150,000 a year. Civilian nurses will receive payment equating to an annual salary of £80,000.
The MoD is short of about 230 doctors, surgeons and nurses specialising in all areas of medicine and surgery, including anaesthetics, burns and plastic surgery, general surgery, orthopaedic surgery, neurosurgery, emergency care and radiology.
To try to meet the shortfall, it has signed a multi-million pound, four-year contract with Frontier Medical, a recruitment agency which specialises in hiring civilian doctors to work for the military.
The MoD has an established policy of recruiting medical personnel on an ad hoc basis, but it is understood that this is the first time it has signed a long-term contract with a specialist recruitment agency.
Medical staff who take up the offer will not become members of the Armed Forces, nor will they be given a rank or be issued with a uniform.
However, they will receive a week's basic training and be supplied with a helmet and body armour. In line with the rest of the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, they will not have to pay for their food or accommodation.
Maria Rooney, 33, a clinical nurse specialist, is among those who have signed up.
Miss Rooney, who is working with frontline British troops in an Army field hospital, said: "This is a completely different kind of pressure to working for the NHS. It's certainly not a training ground, but you learn a lot.
"If you arrive with real experience, the right attitude and are prepared to work with a team, it's an extremely rewarding and unique experience."
Another specialist trauma nurse, a Canadian national who works in a hospital in the North of England, said she had been promised £20,000 for three months' work in Iraq. After that, she intends to return to the UK for a month before starting another three-month term at a field hospital at Basra.
The nurse, who asked not to be named, said it was a "once in a lifetime opportunity to earn £40,000 in just six months".
Registered nurses in the NHS earn about £25,000 a year, similar to the salary of a registered nurse serving in the Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps.
Consultants in the Army and NHS both start on salaries of around £72,000.
The civilian deals have attracted criticism from Army medical staff, with one doctor describing the salaries on offer as "blood money".
The Defence Medical Services has been understaffed for years, but the demands of military action in both Iraq and Afghanistan have exacerbated the problem. Many staff have resigned while others complain of poor morale.
According to recent MoD figures, none of the 12 medical categories is fully staffed. In anaesthetics, only 48 of the 90 trained staff posts are filled and there are only 18 general surgeons to fill 42 posts. Only 12 of the 18 are considered deployable.
The MoD has only 13 personnel trained for accident and emergency - 55 per cent fewer than required. The situation for general physicians is identical, while none of the three vacancies for neurosurgeons is filled.
News of the recruitment drive comes just a week after The Sunday Telegraph revealed that casualty evacuation times from battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan were slower than those achieved by the Americans in Vietnam 40 years ago.
Dr Brendan McKeating, the chairman of the Armed Forces committee at the British Medical Association, admitted that the shortages were "deeply worrying" but insisted there was no anecdotal evidence that it was affecting frontline care.
However, Dr Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary, said: "Near criminal complacency has seen the Defence Medical Services run down at a time when we are fighting on two fronts."
A spokesman for the MoD said: "The Defence Medical Services have met all the operational requirements placed on them and clinical care has not suffered as a result of any manpower shortages."
