NHS doctors working in private healthcare ‘on the side’ directly harming health service, says senior consultant

‘NHS doctors who work in private healthcare “on the side” are directly harming the health service, a senior consultant has said.

In a confessional article in medical journal the BMJ, cardiologist Dr John Dean said that he had stopped working in the private sector after realising the “direct adverse effects on the NHS”.

Many experienced NHS doctors run or work in a private practice alongside their NHS work. There are no rules against it in principle but consultant contracts stipulate there must be no conflict of interest between NHS and private work.

However, Dr Dean, who has himself supplemented his main income from Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust with private work, writes that any time spent in the private sector deprives the NHS of consultants’ hours, and warned that private practice creates “a perverse incentive” to increase NHS waiting times.’

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