A deadly directive - Telegraph In 2004, James Johnson, then chairman of the BMA council, told a parliamentary committee that his organisation had been warning the Department of Health for at least three years about the "impending disaster" of the EU Working Time Directive, which limits doctors to a 48-hour working week. Medical professionals were concerned that it would lead to shortages of doctors and risks to patients. Since the directive was fully implemented in 1999 to cover doctors in training, the predictions have been proved correct. The restriction in hours has deprived the NHS of the equivalent of 9,000 doctors at the same time as the new GP contract has led to fewer working evenings and weekends, placing more pressure on hospital A&E units. With a growing, and ageing, population, this was a crisis waiting to happen. Its scale was revealed in yesterday's Hospitals on the Edge report, which warned that wards are on the "brink of collapse" because of the shortage of out-of-hours doctors. Some hospitals are closing their doors to patients several times a year because they are unable to cope. It is ironic that the avowed purpose of the directive was to protect people's health and safety; in Britain's hospitals it is having precisely the opposite effect. The Government cannot allow this to continue. Challenging the directive through the normal EU channels could take years, with no guarantee of success at the end of it. Surely there is a case here for emulating our EU partners, who tend to take a far less fastidious approach to ill-considered directives than we do, and unilaterally exempting hospital doctors from the ruling. If the European Commission objects to such an approach, that would be a fight worth having for a Conservative Prime Minister keen to repatriate powers.