Morning Star: Building unity against the Westminster consensus on the NHS

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NHS sign

JUNIOR doctors walking out for a fifth time this weekend are blamed by Tory ministers for the NHS’s record-breaking waiting lists.

Their pay restoration demands are billed as greedy, though the case they make is straightforward, as the British Medical Association’s junior doctors committee co-chair Dr Robert Laurenson points out: “Over the last 15 years, the government has cut our pay by 31.7 per cent so we’re looking to restore that pay back to what it was like in 2008.”

Rishi Sunak declines even to discuss this — maintaining that the current offer is “fair and final,” on the grounds it has been recommended by an “independent” (by which he means government-appointed) pay review body.

Labour backs the Tory policy for reducing waiting lists, which is to increase NHS use of private-sector providers.

This cannot possibly work, since the private sector is parasitical on the NHS and poaches NHS staff. Commissioning more private-sector work actively worsens the NHS staffing crisis.

Our demand ultimately needs to be for more resources for the NHS. It needs more staff, it needs to pay them more and it needs to treat them better.

The Westminster consensus against raising spending needs to be challenged. It’s therefore disappointing that Scottish Labour simply carped at the Scottish National Party after research it commissioned exposed the huge funding gap between the NHS and European healthcare systems — with Germany and Norway spending a full third more per head on healthcare than we do.

Continue ReadingMorning Star: Building unity against the Westminster consensus on the NHS

Doctors’ confidence in Tories reaches new low

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/doctors-confidence-in-tories-reaches-new-low

BMA survey reveals breakdown of trust as junior doctors brace for biggest walkout in NHS history

People take part in a rally in Trafalgar Square in London, in support of striking NHS junior doctors, as the British Medical Association holds a 96-hour walkout in a dispute over pay. Picture date: Tuesday April 11, 2023.
People take part in a rally in Trafalgar Square in London, in support of striking NHS junior doctors, as the British Medical Association holds a 96-hour walkout in a dispute over pay. Picture date: Tuesday April 11, 2023.

THE loss of trust between doctors and Tory ministers is the “worst it has been for at least three decades,” the British Medical Association (BMA) has warned.

In a damning intervention ahead of the 75th birthday of the NHS on Wednesday, the union’s council chairman Dr Phil Banfield stressed that he has never known such a breakdown of trust in his 30 years as a medic.

It is an “absolute travesty” that doctors feel they have no other choice but to strike following more than a decade of plummeting take-home pay, he added.

The warning came as junior doctors prepare to stage the biggest walkout in the history of the health service between July 13 and 18.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/doctors-confidence-in-tories-reaches-new-low

Continue ReadingDoctors’ confidence in Tories reaches new low

Record number of junior doctors vote overwhelmingly for strike action

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/record-number-of-junior-doctors-vote-overwhelmingly-for-strike-action

Junior doctors wear scrubs and masks as they sit down in a silent protest outside Bristol Royal Infirmary on the second day of all-out strike action in April 2016

JUNIOR doctors in England have voted overwhelmingly to take strike action over pay, their union the British Medical Association (BMA) announced today.

Almost 37,000 members of the union took part in the ballots with 98 per cent saying they were in favour of striking, which the BMA said will be a three-day action.

The vote is the largest turnout for a ballot of doctors by the BMA, and a record number of junior doctors voted for strike action.

BMA junior doctors committee co-chairs Dr Robert Laurenson and Dr Vivek Trivedi said: “The government has only itself to blame, standing by in silent indifference as our members are forced to take this difficult decision.”

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/record-number-of-junior-doctors-vote-overwhelmingly-for-strike-action

Continue ReadingRecord number of junior doctors vote overwhelmingly for strike action

NHS in crisis :: review

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Image of George Osborne asking where is the money to be made in the NHS

The short NHS in crisis series of the past week or so went fairly well. We’ve learned

There are plenty of resources for further research e.g. there’s plenty on what junior doctors are and do at youtube.

I’ll be watching and reporting NHS news. Current NHS news is that the BMA have cancelled an intended 48 hour strike by junior doctors next Tuesday. I’m sure that everyone welcomes that news. Kent CCG (Clinical Commissioning Group) has also signed a deal with a hospital in Calais to treat NHS patients. Far from ideal? barking?

 

Continue ReadingNHS in crisis :: review

NHS in crisis :: Unpatriotic militants? No, Jeremy Hunt – doctors are just fighting to be able to care for us all.

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Clare Gerada on the strike by junior doctors.

 

Image of George Osborne asking where is the money to be made in the NHS

Unpatriotic militants? No, Jeremy Hunt – doctors are just fighting to be able to care for us all.

Being a doctor – or any public sector worker – shouldn’t be such a battle. That’s why we must support junior doctors in their planned strikes.

For the last 9 years I have been the medical director of an NHS service providing confidential help to doctors and dentists with mental health problems, seeing a rising number of doctors week on week.

But our patients have changed.

In our early days the ‘typical’ patient was an older male (GP or psychiatrist) with alcohol problems.

Now nearly half of all new patients are under 30 years old. They come to us with depression, anxiety and symptoms akin to posttraumatic stress disorder. Many have worked in the NHS only a few years. They started out bushy tailed and bright eyed, but end up ‘burnt-out’ (a polite euphemism for depression) after only a few years working. Our youngest patients are only a few months qualified and many are in their Foundation years.

Patient after patient talks of feeling betrayed and bewildered by their loss of enthusiasm about a profession that they had strived to enter (often since their early teens). How their desire to care for patients is sapped by every working day. The language they use to describe their work is that of the battlefield. Being on the ‘front-line’, of ‘surviving’ another shift, being ‘at war’ with management. They talk of feeling abandoned by the NHS. Of working intolerable shifts that appear to have been designed by robots with no concept that humans will need to work them. Of having no sustenance – literally and metaphorically – as they try their best to deliver care to patients.

They talk of working in an unforgiving environment – where every error will lead to punishment and where every move is watched and recorded. They describe the fun having gone out of their profession. They say that they cannot see a future any more in medicine.

Hardly surprising therefore that the numbers progressing through training (from the early Foundation Years to the start of specialty training) is reducing. That now nearly half of doctors are not progressing. And that this is against a background of fewer of our brightest entering medicine in the first place.

Our junior doctors are striking for more than pay and conditions – important though these are. Their planned strike is consciously or unconsciously action to shine a light on what is going on within the NHS – to shine a light on the conflict between idealism and industrialization.

Increasing privatisation has changed the relationship doctors have with their patients. Constant reorganisation has fragmented services, and shattered long-standing teams. At a series of NHS listening events I held in 2014, the overwhelming term used by all NHS staff to describe their working environment was ‘Fear’.

The pay of junior doctors has never been good – not when calculated across the hours worked, the responsibilities they have and when compared to their non-medical peers.

But this was part of the compact we all had – we gave our all for our patients and the organisation we worked in gave their all to us – cared for us, nurtured us, trained us.  We also knew that the intolerable hours would end as we climbed the medical career ladder. Now all of this has been fractured.

Instilling ‘fear’ in doctors, teachers, nurses and other public sector workers is deliberate government policy – as explicitly set out by Cameron’s policy guru, Oliver Letwin, in 2011.

The new junior doctor contract will erode not just pay but also the current safety net against exploitative hours of work. Saturdays will be counted the same as week-days (tell their children that when they are off school and wanting to see Mum or Dad). Women and others who take career breaks will be discriminated against. Junior doctors have been forced to look into the abyss and chose between pain today (strike action) or pain tomorrow (agreeing to an unfair and unsafe contract). They are being treated as children rather than the committed adults they are – their please ignored, instead accused by Jeremy Hunt of being ‘extreme’, ‘militants’, and even unpatriotic.

The junior doctors are not alone in their discontent. The nurses who are marching this Saturday, the teachers and social workers, in fact most public sector workers have seen insecurity, exploitation, fear, and subtle discrimination as the backdrop to their working lives.

The junior doctors are fighting for fairness for all of these workers.  They are leading the charge for a restoration of the values that should drive our public services. For a change by those who employ them – ultimately our Government – who have a moral duty to protect those who care for some of the most vulnerable in society.

Without this change, goodwill will disappear forever and with it the glue that binds our public services together. The government must now stop their bullying tactics and accept that something is profoundly wrong the NHS today and act before it is too late.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

 

Continue ReadingNHS in crisis :: Unpatriotic militants? No, Jeremy Hunt – doctors are just fighting to be able to care for us all.

NHS in crisis :: Not fair, not safe – 6 reasons junior doctors are preparing to strike

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Not fair, not safe – 6 reasons junior doctors are preparing to strike
by Nick Carpenter

Image of George Osborne asking where is the money to be made in the NHS

The junior doctor contract governs the pay and conditions of work from doctors’ foundation year to registrar level. All doctors who are not consultants or fully qualified GPs are considered ‘junior’ doctors. This contract was scheduled for renegotiation, but the British Medical Association (BMA) – the largest representative body of doctors – walked away because the offer on the table was not fair to doctors and not safe for patients.

The government’s initial response was brazen, and threatened to impose the new terms without consultation – a position it has had to water down since the BMA decided to ballot its members for strike action. Here’s why the BMA has done so the first time in 40 years:

  1. An NHS in crisis: overworked and undervalued.

Britain’s doctors have had enough. In a stretched and underfunded health system which doesn’t train enough doctors and nurses to meet its own needs – or invest in the infrastructure needed for new hospitals and facilities unless aprivate contractor is taking a nice slice of the pie – the solution seems to have been ‘work harder and take up the slack’. According to the Royal College of Physicians, the NHS “remains reliant on doctors working longer than their contracted hours…the amount of ‘goodwill work’ is increasing year-on-year.”

Trusts struggling to pay their tithes to the private owners of NHS hospital buildings have responded by reducing staff salaries, meaning fewer doctors and nurses are covering more patients and expected to do so for free. The situation has reached crisis point and doctors are experiencing enormous burnout, with more doctors applying to live abroad every year. Into this context came the new contract.

  1. It’s not about the money.

The ‘offer’ of the new contract has been condemned first and foremost as fundamentally unsafe. Just as with the recent tube strike, the new contract threatens to force doctors to work longer and later with fewer safeguards.

The BMA approached negotiations acknowledging financial limitations but determined to improve safety: it wanted no doctor to work more than 72 hours in a week; no more than four nights in a week on-call; a rest day either side of nights before starting back on day shifts; and facilities to sleep-in for those who otherwise make a dangerous long drive home.

The government was unwilling to accept these terms, and furthermore wanted to reduce breaks to just one 30 minute break in a ten hour on-call shift. As a recent viral video asked, could you save a life if you’d been up all night?

  1. But it is, also, about the money.

The new contract would mean a 15-40% pay-cut depending on your specialism, with GPs and emergency care doctors being some of the hardest hit. Let that sink in.

With wages starting beneath the national median anddecreasing yearly like all public sector pay, and out of pocket expenditure for licensing, exams and indemnities, junior doctors earn significantly less than the tabloids would have you believe. Their reports often use a cunning sleight of hand: taking the figures for the pay of those doctors doing the most private work – GPs who run a private practice and some consultants who run private clinics – and presenting the data as proof of ‘greedy’ public sector workers.

There are two ways doctors’ starting wages increase: extra pay for unsociable hours, and pay advancement as you progress through the ranks of seniority and responsibility. Both of these are under threat in the new contract.

The government has suggested that working from 7am until 10pm Monday to Saturday are sociable hours – and therefore should not be paid extra – which is funny considering MPs just reduced their own working hours and increased their own pay. As for pay progression with seniority, no actual offer was made.

  1. The changes hit women hardest.

The contract changes penalise those who take time out to start a family and those who work part-time –overwhelmingly affecting women in both cases. Additionally there are concerns that changes to breaks will make work more dangerous for pregnant women. As noted above GPs will be amongst those taking the largest wage cut, one of the few specialisms with more women than men.

  1. No confidence in Jeremy Hunt.

More than 200k people signed the petition to debate a vote of no confidence in Jeremy Hunt. He wrongly and infamously implied that doctors don’t work at night or weekends. After blaming the A&E crisis last winter on people attending inappropriately (rather than, say, the reduction of roughly 13k hospital beds over the last five years), Mr Hunt felt it was appropriate to take his own children to A&E rather than wait for an appointment like, you know, the rest of us commoners.

But most of all:

  1. This was an imposition, not a negotiation.

Hunt and the government have shown a complete disdain for even the barest semblance of actual negotiation. When the BMA walked away from negotiations a year ago, it wasn’t as a strategy to get better terms, it was because the negotiations were a farce. It has taken the threat of industrial action for a pathetic attempt at reconciliation to come from the Department of Health, full of vague, unconvincing rhetoric. It is too little, too late. No fruitful discussions can continue with Hunt as health secretary. We have no reason to believe in his word or his competence.

We deserve more. Doctors do not take strike action lightly. Whilst we will always maintain emergency and essential services, the BMA will be balloting its members to strike against the contract in the next month. We hope to see you on the picket lines.

 

  • About the author: Nick is a junior doctor. He tweets at @ZastaNick.This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

 

Continue ReadingNHS in crisis :: Not fair, not safe – 6 reasons junior doctors are preparing to strike

NHS in crisis :: The billions of wasted NHS cash no-one wants to mention

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England’s Junior doctors held a 24-hour strike from 8am yesterday. It was the first of a planned series of strikes. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party and the Green Party should be commended for their support of the strike. (The strike only applies to England).

[15/1/16 11.10am The Labour Party’s position on the strike is complex, ” … Labour’s health spokeswoman Heidi Alexander had explained to them that the party would stand by its policy of not supporting industrial action.” John McDonnell joined junior doctors despite Labour agreement to not endorse strike]

While it’s very tempting to address the strike, today’s featured article instead addresses a fundamental problem with the NHS which is largely ignored by corporate media – that of the huge bureaucratic overhead of imposing a fake, imaginary ‘market’ so that the private sector can extort it’s ‘tax’. The conclusions to be drawn from this article should be clear.

Image of George Osborne asking where is the money to be made in the NHS

The billions of wasted NHS cash no-one wants to mention

Continue ReadingNHS in crisis :: The billions of wasted NHS cash no-one wants to mention