UK Stroke Forum 2025 | Medical workforce crisis in stroke medicine: BIASP workforce strategy
In this interview, Michelle Dharmasiri, MBChB, MRCP, University Hospitals Dorset NHS Foundation Trust, Dorset, UK, discusses the medical workforce crisis in stroke medicine and highlights the strategy of the British Irish Association of Stroke Physicians (BIASP) to address it. She outlines the findings of a survey that elucidated the scale of the crisis, with a large number of vacant posts across the UK and a significant proportion of consultants nearing retirement. Dr Dharmasiri emphasizes the importance of addressing this crisis through strategies focused on recruitment, training, and retention. This interview took place at the UK Stroke Forum (UKSF) 2025 Conference in Aberdeen, UK.
These works are owned by Magdalen Medical Publishing (MMP) and are protected by copyright laws and treaties around the world. All rights are reserved.
Transcript
So this is an hour session really focusing down on the stroke medical workforce crisis. We all have lived experience of this, we’ve got chronic stroke consultant shortages, and it’s a session really hoping to share ideas on how we can solve this, how we can make things better. We’ve got rapidly developing hyper-acute treatments, and we are delivering these. We’re an incredibly resilient and resourceful workforce, and managing to deliver this, but we need to think about the future...
So this is an hour session really focusing down on the stroke medical workforce crisis. We all have lived experience of this, we’ve got chronic stroke consultant shortages, and it’s a session really hoping to share ideas on how we can solve this, how we can make things better. We’ve got rapidly developing hyper-acute treatments, and we are delivering these. We’re an incredibly resilient and resourceful workforce, and managing to deliver this, but we need to think about the future. Part of the BIASP strategy was to investigate the problem and work out the size of the problem. We started off doing a survey via the England ISDNs, which had a great response rate.
So findings have shown that we’ve got 96 consultant vacant posts currently. We know that 70% of trusts have at least one consultant post funded and vacant. We also have the shared problem of many consultants close to retirement. We’ve got 10% of consultants close to retirement, and we have a large locum population. So we have 120 locum consultants. So it’d be really important to expand this data and work out why.
So first of all, many of you will be aware of the new stroke and General Internal Medicine three-year Certificate of Completion of Training, and then also the Certificate of Completion of Training can be mapped out as a portfolio pathway to help experienced clinicians become stroke consultants. We also think our strategy will focus on the core concepts of recruitment, training, and retention. So recruitment from medical schools to our consultant colleagues in other specialities, training, sharing our expertise, trying to broaden and widen stroke medicine experience, and then retention, looking after the people who are in the job, making sure that we retain them and look after their well-being.
This transcript is AI-generated. While we strive for accuracy, please verify this copy with the video.
Read more...
