“Being here has enabled me to flourish in a way that I never dreamed would happen before I came,” says consultant psychiatrist Dr Mandy Abbott, who felt that her career was going nowhere before she arrived in Newcastle as a junior doctor.
As a lifelong Londoner, her father insisted that she would hate it, but he was wrong. She loved it and became a consultant psychiatrist and manager at Northumberland, Tyne and Wear (NTW) NHS foundation trust and, after 14 years, still describes the north-east as “an undiscovered kingdom”.
For Abbott, there is nothing not to like: NTW has an “outstanding” rating from the Care Quality Commission (one of only two NHS providers of mental health and disability services to achieve this nationally) as well as the HSJ award for Trust Provider of the Year 2017 – and one of the region’s best kept secrets is the unspoiled countryside that stretches across much of its territory from South Tyneside to the Scottish border. “It’s been such a good place to live and for bringing up our children,” she says.
Now the trust is actively recruiting doctors for its psychiatry teams and is broad-minded about candidates’ career histories. “Psychiatry often attracts people like me, who’ve had a bit of life experience,” says Dr Tom Lewis, who is a higher trainee doctor at NTW and should take his final step up to become a consultant in two years.
“When I was growing up in the north-east I was desperate to get to London, but when I moved down to study and work as a biomedical engineer it quickly lost its shine.”
As an engineer, Lewis would often chat to patients while he repaired bedside medical equipment and, as they told him their stories, he realised his future lay in a return to his birthplace for a postgraduate conversion course in medicine. Now he cherishes the lower property prices and shorter commuting distances. It’s just 25 minutes from his house in leafy Gosforth to North Tyneside general hospital, compared with 90 minutes on overcrowded buses and trains when he lived down south.
“I went into psychiatry after living with a relative who had a psychotic episode,” says Lewis. “He was very unwell but nobody in my family could understand it, me included, and I think it fuelled my interest in psychiatry because I wanted to know what was going on.”
If Lewis provides an example of an unorthodox route into psychiatry then so does Dr Melanie Grundy, who qualified as a GP but found that 10-minute appointments were nowhere near enough to help her patients with their mental health. She transferred to become a specialty doctor where she has more time to devote to the young people she works with on a medium secure unit.
“Specialty doctors are a heterogeneous group and NTW is very amenable to considering doctors for psychiatry who haven’t come through a psychiatry training route, although I did do a six-month rotation in it as part of my GP training,” Grundy says. “When you’re dealing with people’s lives you’ve got to give them 100% and that’s much easier in what I’m doing now. Unless you have time to go deep down, you’re not going to get to that unaddressed childhood trauma or the attachment issues that might lie beneath the mental health problem.”
Grundy is in no hurry to become a consultant and likes the flexibility of NTW, where she works four days a week and can pursue a passion for jazz in her time off. She is a Trustee of Help Musicians UK and a member of their health advisory board, having become involved with the charity after hearing about their Music Minds Matter project, and as a singer and flautist herself she’s a great fan of the north-east’s vibrant musical and cultural scene.
For those specialty doctors more immediately focused on becoming consultants, NTW offers a fellowship programme for the Certificate of Eligibility for Specialist Registration (CESR) as a way of demonstrating the necessary competencies. The CESR programme has been a “hugely popular” complement to its standard programme, which supports current specialty doctors to progress to a consultant role outside of the traditional training route.
Career development is one of NTW’s strengths, says psychiatrist Dr Charlotte Allan, who is lead consultant at Newcastle Memory Assessment and Management Service and was drawn to the region by its reputation for research on ageing. She received funding from Newcastle University and the local clinical research network towards clinical trials for dementia treatments, for which NTW allowed Allan time out of her busy schedule to conduct the research.
“A cure is the holy grail, but if we can find more drugs to slow down or even stop the development of dementia, that would be a massive step forward,” she says. “I’m grateful for the time I have for research because it wouldn’t have been given by all NHS trusts. NTW is very mindful of the importance of developing other skills and, as a result, job satisfaction is high.”
But, as circuitous routes into the field go, Dr Arun Gupta’s takes some beating: it wound all the way from Lucknow Medical College and 20 years with the Indian government in Delhi to Sunderland via Crawley. It was, he says, thanks to Tony Blair.
“His government launched an International Fellowship scheme and I applied,” says Gupta, a consultant psychiatrist and now, like Abbott, one of the trust’s 12 associate medical directors. “We were allowed to visit different places to find out what they were like, so I looked at Crawley and Sunderland. I chose the north-east for its lower cost of living and friendly people. I’ve never regretted it for a moment.”
Why the north-east?
Great transport links, including an international airport.
Excellent value for money: the average cost of a detached home in England is £394,000 but in the north-east it is only £265,000.
Excellent quality of schools in the region, which perform above the national average.
The north-east is home to an array of museums and galleries, and a buzzing restaurant culture and nightlife – meaning you’ll never be short of something to do.
NTW’s hospitals and treatment centres are located only a short distance from the region’s stunning countryside and Newcastle and Sunderland city centres.
Find out more about our exciting opportunities at ntw.nhs.uk/careers
