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News Desk Consultants and medical staff at London's Accident & Emergency departments are facing 'intolerable' pressure according to the College of Emergency Medicine, and an investigation by thelondondailynews.com, which is leading to "burnout" amongst doctors. According to the survey by the College of Emergency Medicine a 'worryingly high number of A&E doctors is suffering from burnout' because of relentless and "intolerable" work pressures, such as routine extra hours and being on-call regularly, emergency unit specialists have warned. Thelondondailynews.com spoke with consultants at three London A&E hospitals and found that the hours and demands caused many to leave the NHS and some to leave the UK. One consultant who the thelondondailynews.com spoke to who wanted to remain anonymous said: "I have worked 36 hours continuously in conditions that can only be compared to the third world, with staff that are demoralised and face continuous abuse and threats by patients." The College of Emergency Medicine has said that "the future staffing of emergency departments is in question because too few junior doctors are choosing to work within them and growing numbers of A&E consultants are moving abroad". A CEM survey of 1,077 A&E consultants in UK hospitals found 62 per cent of them believe the job they are doing is unsustainable in its current form, while 94 per cent work overtime in order to ensure high-quality care. Work-life balance is so difficult for A&E doctors, and the workload so constant and increasingly complex, that existing recruitment problems threaten to become a crisis, the CEM warns. The BBC has reported that "NHS leaders need to urgently come up with ways to ease the burden on A&E staff through "safe and sustainable working practices for consultants and other senior decision-makers in emergency department" in order to ensure they have "adequate time off for rest and recuperation". Only two A&E consultants left the NHS to work abroad in 2009, 21 did so last year – "a worrying trend", said the CEM, which warned that highly-trained doctors were being lost to the NHS because too much is expected of them. The Department of Health said it had given an extra £500m to A&E units in England to help them cope with growing pressures and was trying to persuade more junior doctors to choose a career in emergency medicine.
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