Treat our doctors fairly Mr Hunt, so that they can treat us safely

Update 18th June
As the Junior Doctors begin to vote on the contract offer, opinion remains split. There are plenty of reasons for rejecting the offer but many doctors feel they have gone as far as they can and want to get on with their training/careers. Another result for Hunt - divide the opposition. Most are agreed that the current offer is a massive improvement on the original proposals and also on the March offer. There are some significant concessions by the junior doctors (for example the loss of increments) and other technical worries remain partly because of Hunt's insistence on the 7 day concept and his neutral cost envelope. But the main concern is the effect on staffing and recruitment as well as the loss of momentum in the huge wave of public support to preserve the NHS. The rejecters say "The contract on offer will not fix the recruitment and retention crisis. It is not going to help trainees on rotas with less than 50% fill rates such as GP and Core Medical Training. It is not going to help with the cost of living crisis as inflation continues to outstrip pay. It is not going to attract trainees back from abroad and encourage people to stay as a doctor in the NHS. It will drive LTFT [doctors in less than full-time training] out of medical and surgical specialties and possibly out of medicine as a career, despite the best efforts of our negotiators to prevent that. It will require a constant fight with management in order to be paid for the work we do, with no independent oversight, without concrete safeguards that a hospital has any legal duty to honour." See here

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We were asked by the Sheffield Star to submit a short article for possible publication in a feature on the strikes on 26th April. This is what we wrote.

"Talk to almost any junior doctor and you’ll immediately sense their anxiety not just about their own future but about the whole NHS. Jeremy Hunt’s insistence on trying to stretch the NHS while cutting its funding is squeezing staff at all levels beyond endurance. As numbers fall, junior doctors find themselves rostered to provide more and more extra cover with less help, often in unfamiliar surroundings and knowing that any mistake will be jumped on. In the 2015 NHS Staff Survey only 31% of staff agreed that there are enough staff for them to do their job properly.

We already have fewer doctors per head than most other European countries. 80% of junior doctors work unpaid overtime, often 11 hours a week. In 2008, 22% of doctors using the official ‘sick doctor service’ were aged under 35 but by 2015 that number was 54%. In 5 years newly qualified doctors joining NHS training schemes have reduced from 71% to 52%. Many trainees are planning gap years from this August because the proposed contract is the last straw. It also discriminates against women doctors.

Hunt’s 7 day service plan is based on misleading statistics and an ill-thought-out manifesto commitment totally derailed by his government’s austerity programme. The NHS will be less safe and possibly not even sustainable. Despite considerable progress in negotiations, the disagreement about Saturday working is less about pay than about clinical staff being able to retain enough control over their working lives to ensure they can make decisions and carry out treatments safely. If the doctors lose, nurses and other clinical staff will be next. We call on Sir Andrew Cash at STHFT not to implement the contract locally.

Without junior doctors our health service will collapse. Nobody wants these strikes but any short term safety risks are outweighed by the longer term danger of system collapse. Not all doctors’ strikes have been for the NHS but this one definitely is. They need our support."

Although several of us are away during the week, we shall be supporting the pickets at the major hospitals and the rally in Barkers Pool at 1pm on 27th April.