As part of a survey of all career grade doctors in NHS Scotland about flexible working, 1,650 hospital consultants completed a discrete choice experiment, together with questions about their workloads, contractual status, income and family circumstances. To quantify their strength of preference for various aspects of their work, a monetary value for each job characteristic was calculated. This reflects the income consultants would be prepared to give up or accept for a change in the level of another job characteristic.
The most important characteristic was on-call. Consultants would need to be compensated up to £18000 (30% of their average net income) for a high on-call workload, while compensation of up to £9700 (16% of their net income) would be required to forgo opportunities to undertake non-NHS work.
Consultants would be willing to accept £7000 (12% of net income) as compensation for fair rather than good working relationships with staff, and £6500 (11% of net income) to compensate them for a shortage of staff.
The least important characteristic was hours of work, with £562 per year (0.9% of net income) needed to induce consultants to work one extra hour per week, although the importance changed as the number of hours increased.
Preferences (and prices) differed depending on consultants' own circumstances, such as age, sex, age, family circumstances, speciality, income, and location.
The questionnaire was designed before detailed proposals for the new consultant contract were published. However, the results still have important implications for the remuneration of consultants, and should be used to help address recruitment and retention problems, conclude the authors.