London, Aug. 23 (PTI): A mass exodus of doctors, including Indians, looms on Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) with the introduction of a new contract allowing them to retire early on full pension.

The contract is designed to give doctors greater rewards for their working hours, replacing the fixed-salary system.

Stephen Campion, the chief executive of the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association, said pension benefits would encourage doctors disillusioned with the NHS to call time on their careers.

The worst-affected specialisations are likely to include radiography, pathology, paediatrics and psychiatry, which suffer from severe staff shortage.

The British Medical Association warns that by 2007, nearly 4,000 senior consultants will have little or no financial incentive to continue working for the NHS.

“A mass exodus will exacerbate staffing problems in the service, which at present has a shortfall of 10,000 hospital doctors,” a spokesman of the doctors’ group said.

Paul Miller, the chairman of the BMA consultants’ committee, said ministers and NHS leaders need to prepare for the possible exodus of “the most senior consultants… who will have had 25 years of invaluable experience”.

He added: “You could find you go into work on April 1, 2007, and every consultant over the age of 60 in the NHS has retired. The majority will have hit their best point financially, and will want to go. It could be a retirement time bomb.”

The new contract, which begins in 2005, boosts the salaries of top consultants by £20,000 to £92,000. Their pension contributions will rise in line with their pay, meaning that they will hit the maximum achievable pension — just under half their salary — by their early sixties.

Some could even retire as early as their mid-50s with only a slight deduction in their retirement benefits.

The pension scheme — which will increase senior consultants’ pensions by about £10,000 a year — will be introduced in two waves in 2006 and 2007.

More than 700 doctors who have been consultants for 30 years will reach their maximum pension on March 31, 2006, under the new contract.

In 2007, 3,000 more consultants who have served between 20-29 years — 10 per cent of England’s consultant workforce — will qualify.

The BMA’s warning comes amid mounting concern about the future staffing of the NHS. Hospital trusts said the introduction of the European working time directive this month, which is designed to curb the long hours of trainee doctors, could lead to a shortage of junior doctors.

A new contract for general practitioners, which allows them to take weekends and nights off, has also seen doctor shortfalls, with some primary care organisations resorting to flying in doctors from abroad as emergency cover.

There are also fears that an exodus will significantly outpace recruitments over the next five years as a large number of overseas doctors, who settled in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s and took up mainly single-doctor practices, approach retirement.