'It's just spin': Scottish doctor who left the NHS for Australia says the government cannot blame NHS crisis on Covid pandemic

Dr Michael Mrozinski says the government new the crisis in the NHS was coming before the pandemic hit

A Scottish doctor who left the NHS to work in Australia says blaming the coronavirus pandemic for the NHS crisis is “spin”.

Dr Michael Mrozinski, who had worked as a locum accident-and-emergency consultant and is from Glasgow, left the NHS in 2016 to practise medicine in Australia. He said the Scottish and UK governments could not use the pandemic as an excuse for failings in the health service.

His comments come after the General Medical Council (GMC) published a report on Friday in which almost one in three doctors surveyed said they were likely to move abroad to work in the next 12 months.

A Scottish doctor who now practises medicine in Australia says the government cannot blame the Covid pandemic for the crisis. Image: Peter Byrne/Press Association.

Dr Mrozinski was asked during a BBC Scotland interview for his thoughts on government ministers saying the pandemic was to blame for the issues facing the NHS.

He said: “Honestly, I think it’s just spin from the government. I left in 2016 and I could see the writing on the wall from 2014 that things weren’t going in the right direction.

“Covid probably finished it off, but you can’t use it as an excuse. The government knew this was coming.

“In Australia, Covid was hard for a couple of years, but we have a good workforce and a looked-after workforce, and we are now completely back to normal. I would be careful with people saying ‘aye, we’ve been through a pandemic, it’s hard and it’s taken its toll’, because this workforce issue has been going on for a long while.

“The government is quite happy to have something they can blame it on. But I don’t think it should be used as an excuse – this has been coming for a long time.”

A GMC survey stated that almost one in three doctors had said they were ‘very likely’ or ‘fairly likely’ to move abroad to work in the next 12 months. The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh said this needed to be a “wake-up call” for both the Scottish and UK governments.

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More than 13 per cent of those practising in the UK who were surveyed said they were “very likely” and a further 17 per cent said they were “fairly likely” to leave the NHS to work elsewhere in the survey. More than 75 per cent of doctors also reported feeling under-valued professionally.

British Medical Association representative body chair and workforce lead Dr Latifa Patel said: “When we’re already short of doctors, these figures are incredibly worrying, showing almost a third of doctors surveyed saying they are likely to move to work abroad in the next 12 months. If the intentions laid out in this survey are followed through across the workforce this year, losing such a significant proportion of the UK’s medical expertise would be disastrous for patients.

“That so many doctors say they are looking to leave for overseas is not surprising though, when we consider the immense pressures healthcare staff are under in an overwhelmed service battling huge workforce shortages."

Dr Patel added: “There is much more employers and policymakers can do to support doctors in their workplaces and improve their working lives – including seemingly simple things such as providing fit-for-purpose computers and somewhere to rest or park their cars at their workplace.”