http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/rosamund-urwin-jeremy-hunt-s-beef-with-junior-doctors-has-gone-too-far-a3200311.html
Rosamund Urwin: Jeremy Hunt’s beef with junior doctors has gone too far
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This week, Jeremy Hunt has been talking about blunders. The Health Secretary — a man who once stated his faith in magic water (homeopathy) to cure disease — is certainly an expert in those, what with misusing statistics about weekend death rates in the NHS, igniting a mad war on junior doctors and that time he pulled the emergency cord in a train loo en route to Conservative Party conference.
But no, he actually meant mistakes made by the medical profession. It was just one of a number of negative stories about the NHS yesterday, just as junior doctors staged a 48-hour walkout in response to Hunt’s decision to impose a new contract on them come summer. What an amazing coincidence.
Because who are the laziest, most selfish, money-grabbing tosspots in our society? After nurses and nuns, it’s got to be doctors, hasn’t it? Why else wouldn’t they just accept Hunt’s oh-so-kind proposal of a 13 per cent pay “rise”? It is, admittedly, a strange kind of pay rise. As a friend and neurosurgeon put it: “Just received our new, improved and generous offer from the good old Department of Health. A mere 15.3 per cent pay cut. Delighted.”
Junior doctors have taken undeserved flak for striking. On Sunday, a trolling clown from the Adam Smith Institute dismissed them on Twitter as “low-tech prescription writing machines”. Yup, those magicians who can conjure a new jaw from part of a shoulder blade are just glorified ATMs for drugs.
They’ve been scolded too for having interests outside medicine, because God forbid a doctor would have enough time off work to see their friends, have a drink or travel. They must be chained to the operating table! Imprisoned on wards! My favourite of these smears was the medic accused of taking a lavish holiday when she was actually volunteering at a clinic overseas. But if she had been having a holiday, would that have been so terrible? Someone doesn’t have to forgo all joys, accept peanuts for a salary or lump godawful working conditions just because they’re a public-sector employee. They didn’t sign up for martyrdom but to save lives.
Most ludicrously — and yet repeatedly — the words of NHS founder Nye Bevan have been used against doctors in a bid to show that they were always out for themselves. Bevan famously said he had “stuffed [doctors’] mouths with gold” to broker the deal to create the NHS. That was in the 1940s. He clearly wasn’t talking about the same doctors we are today. Back then, doctors resisted the NHS; now they’re the ones trying to save it.
I bet Bevan would be at the picket line today. Because this isn’t just a pay dispute. It’s not even about keeping doctors happy (although you’d think a contented NHS workforce would be considered an asset), it’s about keeping them — and their patients — safe.
If this new contract is imposed, NHS England risks haemorrhaging even more junior doctors. They’ll go overseas, or to Scotland, or quit the profession altogether. Medical students will be more inclined to look at other careers. That, in an already overstretched and understaffed NHS, will be catastrophic. Doctors rightly fear being made to work even more hours and ever-more anti-social ones, plugging holes in rotas. As the placards outside hospitals today remind us, “tired doctors make mistakes”. That isn’t in any of our interests.
Even the best medics — as Hunt noted yesterday — do sometimes make mistakes. As Health Secretary, he should be trying to foster an environment where those are as few as possible. He’d be wise to start by dropping this cruel joke of a new contract.
Roshana Mehdian
Wow
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