Base Specialty Survey – Implications for Future Staffing of UK Intensive Care Units

Intensive care units in the UK have traditionally been staffed by consultants whose background specialty is anaesthesia. As the specialty of intensive care medicine continues to expand, it is becoming increasingly attractive to doctors from other disciplines, particularly emergency medicine and the medical specialties. The Trainee Division Committee of the Intensive Care Society is concerned that trainees from non-anaesthetic base specialties reaching the end of their training could have difficulty securing consultant positions if available jobs are linked only with sessions in anaesthesia. In order to gauge the scale of this potential problem, we elected to ascertain the base specialty of consultants currently working in intensive care in the UK to establish how large the discrepancy is between the number of non-anaesthetic doctors in training in intensive care and the number of non-anaesthetic consultants currently in post.