“WHEN I go into my department on Saturday night there will be somebody who would have been for 24 hours, they may still be there when I go in on Sunday night,” Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine told the Labour Conference.

“Seeing that is incredibly demoralising. We need to have flow and capacity to look after our people properly.”

The doctor at Addenbrooke’s teaching hospital in Cambridge was among a four-strong panel of medical experts who revealed a raft of urgent practical measures to help the NHS retention and staffing crisis.

Their fringe meeting was about the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan (LTWP).

But published in June almost six years after being announced in 2017, the experts warned it would be too little too late without “immediate” measures to improve staff retention and morale.

The consequences of ignoring staff have been seen in the case of the serial baby killer Lucy Letby and will be adding to the NHS’s enormous litigation bill as patients increasingly walk out of A&Es, it was heard.

With NHS waiting lists in England at a record 7.7 million and the Tories preferring strikes to continue than conducting pay negotiations with the British Medical Association (BMA), they outlined a raft of pragmatic ideas to help the staffing crisis.

Boyle said: “My speciality has the dubious honour of being the most burnt out of all.

“And the reasons for this are not hard to understand. I could be working this weekend and it will be perfectly possible to start work at 10 o'clock on Saturday night and have a queue of 100 people me and three junior doctors have to get through.

“I'm regularly told by my members of the overcrowding and overworking in their departments.”

Dr Matthew Davies, president of the association of anaesthetics, added he’d seen junior doctors leaving after two months of qualifying.

“I think one of the things about the workforce of the future, and it is the word future, is it's long term,” he said.

“But the problem is by the time these things are realised we are five or ten years down the line and we need a solution now.

“Because by the time we get to five or ten years time, there will be literally very few workforce left working if we do not change the problem now.”

Davies suggested bursaries to tackle the huge £100,000 debt junior doctors enter work with, and, tapping into his 19 years of military experience, suggested an equivalent to the five-year service award a soldier is expected to get.

“Is there a way of changing the way people are educated so they do a degree course and possibly work for the last two years of that course, call it an apprenticeship, it works for many other specialities, so, therefore, they are helping the staffing problem but also not leaving medical school with so much debt,” he asked.

While NHS capacity was the first problem he listed, there were wry smiles in the room when Boyle asked for a show of hands of who thought the health service was a good employer.

"We hear awful things where people are treated like children,” he said.

“They are not able to go to weddings even with months' of advance notice. This is not an unfixable problem about just treating the workforce with professionalism and respect. It's an easy thing.”

Staff surveys outlined the problem with NHS culture.

“It really comes down to a couple of basic things around autonomy, treating people with respect, allowing people to do simple things like self-roster,” he continued.

“Self-rostering is an easy that would help people actually get control over their working lives. It should be at worst cost neutral, at best actually generate work cost saving and simple workforce hygiene: hot meals out of hours, getting the rotas in advance, a culture of being looked after.”

The consequences of a lack of staff retention and capacity means procedures are repeatedly cancelled and “there's a litigation penalty if we don't get this sorted,” warned the medic.

Dr Sarah Clarke, president of the Royal College of Physicians, said: “There are so many basics which we are not getting right in the workforce at the moment and we need to.

“Additional doctors will be for nothing if we don't look after our existing doctors and if they leave.

“The IT systems are not joined up, you cannot go to another hospital and see what's happening to a patient.”

BMA chair Professor Phil Banfield said: “We've seen some tragic consequences of ignoring doctors speaking out in Chester and the Isle of Man.

“It’s bonkers that a service that depends on people has not had any form of workforce plan, let alone dreaming of one, since 2017.

“It just is very telling that as doctors we weren't included in the formulation of that plan, so it's no surprise that it has huge deficiencies in the way it claims to value the workforce.

“This is not just about recruiting more, this is about hanging on to the people we've got already.

“That is the immediate issue and we are seeing both senior doctors and really quite alarmingly newly qualified doctors leaving immediately after they qualify.”

NHS chief executive Sir Julian Hartley said shadow health secretary Wes Streeting's plans yesterday announced at the conference “need to be backed by proper staffing and infrastructure. We await the details of this.”

And while Streeting vowed Labour would “never abandon the founding principles of the NHS as a publicly funded public service free at the point of use”, Banfield told the Morning Star: “There's a lack of transparency about how contracts are awarded. In that, they are not disclosed and therefore unavailable for scrutiny.

“This makes it really difficult to work out where the money is going in the NHS. Because some of it may not be being used used on direct patient care.

“The conversation for politicians and the public is what they are willing to pay and the timescale to get back on track and whether they feel the use of a private or third sector is what they would prefer.

“We still feel that if the NHS was better organised and put patient care at the heart of everything it does that would enable us to deliver more care and start to reduce the backlogs.”