People's (including doctors') attitudes to money have not changed over decades. Why then do some sections of society swallow the government and media spin that the current strike action is about greedy doctors wanting to line their own pockets? Never in history have doctors taken this kind of action, and if it was about money they have had plenty of opportunities to do so over the years. What have we come to when caring intelligent professionals feel forced to go to such lengths for the first time ever to make their point and they are simply not being taken seriously? Whilst doctors are well paid relative to most, on the whole they are vocationalists. They become doctors because they want to care for patients. They are striking because what the government is now trying to impose is fundamentally wrong and threatens the very future of the NHS, which is going to struggle to recruit on its new ridiculous and unnecessary terms because reluctantly newly qualified doctors will be attracted by the better conditions available elsewhere. The doctors aren't asking for more money than is being offered. They are asking for a different structure than is being imposed by the government, which is relying on a skewed analysis of a report into weekend care that even the author of the report says the government has totally misrepresented. A cynic might think that the failure of the NHS was something the government was trying to engineer.
-- Edited by smiler on Thursday 21st of April 2016 07:17:58 AM
Where I work the Doctors are fairly split on this.
The senior Doctors feel there is an overreaction to the proposals generally but some are very supportive of the action.
As you have indicated, many feel its unfair and a pointless change as the impact on the quality of care is negligible and the harm is significant in terms of the NHS and Doctors quality of life. The latter point seems to me the issue driving most of the Doctors here . You are absolutely right that its not about Money but it must be remembered they do have a very lucrative career already . The other issue that comes up most regularly is about responsibility and quality. Many Juniors do not feel they are being remunerated adequately for the extra responsibility they will face and also have some ethical questions about the safety issues that stretching the service implies.
Smiler, I believe your final point probably is nearer the truth. Creeping privatisation has been happening piecemeal since Thatcher and has been accelerated under the present government. For example my particular ambulance trust has been starved of funds and been force to cut to the bone (no pun intended) to such an extent it is struggling to function within its remit. It then comes under fire from central government and is fined, as if this is a credible answer. Obviously this only make the hole deeper. In our case, we now see private ambulance companies muscling in to take up the short fall and vying for the contract which they will invariably get, because thats the way the system is set up i.e manufacture failure in the public sector in order to hand it over to the lets get rich quick boys. We only have to look at the standards set by the likes of Serco and G4s to get an idea of what is waiting round the corner for us.
Some may say that competition is good, but we're not talking about beefburgers or washing up liquid manufacturers here, its about peoples lives and well being and I suspect that within the next generation we will have the American style of health service, the very best that modern medicine has to offer,which will be open to everyone, just as long as you are wealthy enough to pay for it. Unless that is we do something about it. The NHS is mine, yours and belongs to us all. It should be non negotiable.
Your`re correct Towdlad, the NHS is ours. It`s also a big black hole that all Governments keep pouring billions of pounds into it. I like to think for all the mistakes the last Labour Government encountered they were not far off sorting the NHS. The Tories will privatise some sections of the NHS, whether that is the way forward well I can`t really answer that one.
That's true. Under the last labour governments the NHS was going from strength to strength .
The Tories hate the NHS but would never say it.
What is happening now is shameful. What is remarkable is how passive the voting public is. The NHS is in a real mess again but the Great British public don't seem to care anymore.
The juniors are grossly over reacting to the imposed contract and the main reasons for them striking are that they want more money for working Saturdays and they do not want to work more weekends than they do presently.
Any other reason is put forward because the real reasons are difficult to defend.
The income on their present contracts is protected and furthermore all they have to work on the new contract to obtain premium rates for Saturday is one weekend in four...Its a shame that doctors have got themselves into a mindset that even this is deemed too much.
Their maximum hours will be protected and these are ridiculously short compared to traditional doctors' working hours and such a short working week is detrimental to their learning and gaining the required skills and experience.
Don't forget that after a few years of apprenticeship they join the top 3 per cent of UK earners.
They are the highest earners of all professions including barristers.
The profession has been over run with women who cannot or will not work the traditional long hours and this has permeated through the whole profession.
Two thirds of newly qualified doctors are women which is just ridiculous but few are aloud to express this opinion freely so most keep quiet.
listening and watching doctors trying to explain their reasons, I find embarrassing as a doctor myself.
I heard a couple of doctors objecting to the imposed contract and their main concern seemed to be childcare issues!
The strike will kill people for sure and most of these deaths will be hidden e.g. delayed heart operations, delayed cancer diagnosis, delayed chemotherapy and so on and so on.
I am shocked to see doctors prepared to abandon their patients in this way and their grievances in no way justify this betrayal of their patients.
The junior are digging themselves into an impossible position and now will be in desperate need of a face saving way out or the only alternative they have left themselves is mass resignation which is a doomsday scenario.
Obviously its not a one way thing and I would agree that the government handling of this has been terrible.
The false and utterly ridiculous promise of a NORMAL 7 day working Health Service is behind all this but the doctors have no right to strike for this reason and maybe they should have changed their middle class voting habits!
On the 7 day promise...It is of course impossible unless billions of pounds are added to the budget which would mean a Health Tax of course.
There is no right and wrong in this dispute, we have two wrongs which is a recipe for disaster and disaster is where we are heading.
You may or may not be right Kempo, I have not studied the minutiae so only rely on the issues given out on the news and depending on where I hear the news then the issues seem to be skewed one way or the other.
For me the facts are this: doctors have to study hard and work hard in the non stop 24 7 365 conveyor belt that the NHS has become (for what ever reason). Many are so fed up, not necessarily due to money, but to working hours and conditions. I support anyone who stand up to defend their rights, hours and conditions they signed up to and are now being altered.
Doctors help us, reassure us, cure us or help us to fulfil our lives in as healthy a way as possible and also help us to die. They are not God but they are there for us in the NHS free at the point of delivery.
Its my guess for all this, they are paid less than many Championship footballers and certainly Premership players, and without doubt work longer gruelling hours. If football was banned tomorrow we would miss it, but it would do us no harm not to have it, and our lives would go on......but without doctors, well I wont bother to tell you how much we need them. They are essential to a healthy society, for me they should be top of the pay pyramid in my opinion along with their paramedic and nursing colleagues with decent working conditions. They should not have to put up with being put under constant pressure wondering whether they are to be subject to further 'reviews', (ie cut backs)every financial year.
As a child my life was saved by a doctor from a fledgling NHS and when either myself or my family are sick I go to a doctor. I for one support their cause!
It is ridiculous for reasons already suggested in this thread to expect a 24 hr health service.
Cynically it is another attempt by the tories to gain another foothold imfir private enterprise.
Doctors are very, very well paid and have an exceptional life style.
There is no way a strike can be justified based on the issues at stake.
It must be remembered that the rotation of a junior doctor into difficult clinical situations is but a brief moment in their training. The idea that they are all zombies living on heartache and caffeine is vastly romanticised.
Training as a Doctor is already hugely privelidge and there aren't many professions where you can continuously fail and get to keep taking the exam. Unfortunately Kempo is also correct about the impact of women at a very young age taking time out of the profession ( of course I support this) and what has become skewed middle class values.
Killing people cannot be justified and Kempos is right this is exactly what will have happened during a strike.
As someone who is still a qualified nurse , I cannot imagine their would ever be any appetite for a similar position from the nursing profession. I'm afraid it is clearly class values.
They are acting out a privelidge historic position and need a reality check. Of course they are a blessing to us but now they are becoming a curse and killing people and that's a fact.
-- Edited by ian on Thursday 28th of April 2016 07:24:50 AM
Good posts from Ian who has a good understanding of behind the scenes healthcare and i agree with most of his thoughts on this.
The doctors are in a difficult position now are their choices are heading towards...losing face or en masse resignation.
They are approaching the edge of the cliff and soon the singing and dancing with placards will have to end and a real decision made.
The latest concern I read in The Times was from a doctor Rita Agarawala....her argument was that an imposed contract would lead to more weekend working and that would make her and her partner less rounded people[doctors] due to missing out on family time!!
Working in healthcare may give a certain insight, but people who don't may still have a valid opinion. To my mind this episode is all about politics and very little to do with healthcare. You say Kempo that the doctors have a difficult choice ahead of them, but the same is true of the government. Sadly, strikes are sometimes an acting out of brinkmanship. It seems to me that for the government to impose a policy for political reasons on the back of a lie and then bank on the fact that when push comes to shove the doctors will blink first is reprehensible morally, politically and whichever way you look at it. I have not seen any claims in the media that anyone died as a result of the action taken, and I have no doubt that the right wing media and other agents of the government would have quick to promote Doctors have never in the history of the NHS felt strongly enough about an issue to take the action that they felt compelled to take recently. I have to ask myself why they are willing to do it now. The idea that as dedicated healthcare professionals they would now take such unprecedented action simply to preserve aspects of their middle or upper middle class existence does not resonate with me, and a single account from one couple which I have no doubt is not at all representative does not alter that view. I accept that the doctors have an awful choice to make if they are faced with the prospect of having to step up the action or giving in, but for me the shame of it is that they are being put in that position in the first place. They are being used as pawns in a political game.
Some good points Smiler and no doubt partially these are motivating factors but lets continue to look at the issue.
They are very, very well paid. There training is exemplary. Their conditions are great. They have noting to moan about.
A government wants to enlarge thge reach of the service and has offered a 13% pay rise!!!!! not the 0.5 % the rest of the NHS has had over 5 years but 13%.
They want to develop a more efficient and comprehensive service. In all the reorganisations I have been involved in during my 25 years thus far working in the NHS , I can honestly say that in part there were good reasons albeit they took far too long and are often badly implemented-but not always.
I agree that governments have motives but there is nothing that seems to fundamentally undermine the idea that improved services would make a difference on weekends and for Gods sake its a job where there needs to be 24 hour cover and much of the rest of the country provides and works on rotas for far less ethnically based reasons.
what do I really think?
I really think this is a huge display of ego. A 13% pay increase will not make you worse off. Having to do more weekends is something one negotiates as part of a team and you plan your life around it. Boo! Hoo!
really, this is not adult and I think its a vast overreaction.
To withdraw medical cover and absolve yourself off responsibility after the country has paid for your training and given you an luxurious lifestyle is morally bankrupt. Time to put the the idealism and privilege to one side and get on with caring and doing a dam fine and very well paid job.
Was the strike damaging-of course it was. If it wasnt then who would care!
Some people will have endured extra pain and distress-guaranteed.
and I think due to delay and obsvervational issues and even cancelled operations that there is a good chance someone died...but it doesnt matter does it because Im on strike because they only gave me 13.5% and someone else will do my job.
Thats really how I feel and I think the Doctors should listen to their hearts and not their culture and background for once and actually do the decent thing.
They are very fair points Ian if you accept the bases upon which they are predicated, but I am afraid that I don't. I don't accept that this government genuinely wants to improve the national health service. I don't accept that there is any problem with the weekend NHS that we have currently. I don't believe that the new working patterns that the government wants to introduce will result in better care - in fact I believe the doctors when they say that it will jeopardise it. And I don't believe that the doctors are striking about pay.
Of course smiler I would agree that everyone can have an opinion on this matter and indeed should.
However to say there is no problem with our weekend NHS needs to be challenged.
Let's forget Primary Care for now and look at secondary care at weekends.
Weekend care for a start is to all intents and purposes emergency care consisting of emergency admissions and response to acute problems that arise with inpatients.
So...you feel that virtually no routine care for 2 days out of 5 is not a problem..I disagree
Let's then look at the quality of weekend care.
Simple observation shows understaffed wards that lack experienced nursing staff.
Doctoring staff are stretched to the limit with unfamiliar doctors looking after large numbers of patients which leads to critical delays in emergency response times.
The doctor is often trying to deal with a number of requests to see patients at the same time causing difficult prioritisation decisions.
Triaging is a way to get around this problem but is done by people who do not have sufficient skills and training to make such important decision calls.
There are often long delays between a patient being admitted or lying in a corridor and doctor assesment.
The collective term for consultants in a hospital at weekends is an absence!..so we have the sickest patients being seen and assessed by the least trained doctors..the most trained being at home.
At weekends there is a skeleton pathology testing, usually no physiotherapy, and shockingly essential investigations such as ultrasound not available or staff have to come in from home leading to great difficulties in getting tests done.
Specialist terminal care services are virtually non existent at weekends leading to possible suffering due to poorly trained doctors and nurses trying to deal with terminal care problems.
There are many more problems in weekend healthcare and the above is just a snapshot
-- Edited by Kempo on Sunday 8th of May 2016 04:46:07 PM
I should reiterate my view that the Government are misleading over 7 day Hospital working as its introduction would cost billions.
Simply spreading out x numbers of doctors through 7 days achieves nothing other than an illusion if x remains the same.
Weekend services do not just require more nurses but lab technicians, pathologists, haematologists, radiology, porters, nurse, physios, theatre technicians, and so on and so on...As you can see...it's impossible.
However the doctors should not be striking but explaining the above.
What we are seeing now is women doctors taking over and constantly bleating a womens rights theme.
If women don't want to work out of hours and weekends then just maybe medicine was a poor choice.
Medicine is a very tough job so let's have people who can and are prepared to do it and not turn this into a woman's right to do less work than a man because she alone has a uterus.
The doctors have tried to explain what the strike is about. The government is not interested and neither are the media. It doesn't fit the right wing agenda that the media as a rule promotes.
Striking must always be a last resort. In the case of professionals who take their responsibilities seriously and have never been known to strike before, I am sure they think that they have no choice when faced with a government that demonstrates astonishing arrogance and refuses to talk or to listen.
Recent reports have demonstrated that the figures about weekend mortality rates by the government were nothing more than spin to push their agenda. The whole basis of the changes is fundamentally flawed.
Your points about women doctors belong in the dark ages. I suspect that you know it and are on the wind up. There can be no other sensible explanation. In a modern, well funded, properly run NHS there would be plenty of scope for the NHS to adopt and adhere to modern working practices. If only we had an NHS that met that description. Sadly, this government is trying to spread scarce resources far too thinly, using the 'seven day NHS' theme as a cover.
Whilst there may be a discussion to be had about improving the weekend service, the extreme proposals pushed and now imposed by the government are neither necessary nor workable in the medium term. They will create carnage. It is this carnage that the junior doctors have warned about, and it is this that is at the heart of the dispute. Not pay, and not equality issues. They are headline grabbing side shows and are (to use an appropriate analogy) visible symptoms rather than the real underlying disease.
I can see why the doctors are critical of the so called 7 day NHS ideas presented by the government because for reasons I have clearly outlined, its not possible without a large increase in taxation.
However this is not a reason for doctors to strike and in fact they do not give this as a reason for their strike.
lets look at your points
1] biting..my points are evidenced based and my true informed opinion so no need to bite
2]Doctors have tried to explain the strike.....As a doctor with a good understanding of the NHS its still unclear tome why they feel the need to strike.
Their explanations are varied and recent propaganda seems to feature women demanding certain rights as women mainly centred on not working at weekends.
Newly qualified doctors are made up of 2/3 women and 1/3 men...a complete reversal to when I qualified.
Why should the NHS run a service that allows women to work less weekends and anti social hours than men?
Doctors hours are already greatly reduced from traditional working hours and the new contract puts in maximum weekly hours to protect the doctors.
Their major grievance is that Saturday premium pay has been reduced to basic pay before 6pm yet they only need to work 1 weekend in 4 to receive premium pay for all Saturday hours!!!!!...How can we have doctors who will not work 1 weekend in 4...its ridiculous!
Basic pay of course has been increased by 13 per cent...poor things!
You say that doctors have never been known to strike before...incorrect!..The junior doctors went on strike when I was a final year medical student so I did a lo*** house officers job to help my consultant!
The government are not refusing to talk..They have been talking for several years and have reopened talks but the doctors are demanding Premium pay for Saturday day work.
The reason the government is adjusting Saturday pay is to allow hospital trusts to roster more doctors on to weekend shifts[without being ripped off with premium rates and agency rates!]
Weekends are clearly under doctored and this is clear to anyone who sets foot into a hospital ward at weekends so the government is doing its job i.e. trying to improve weekend services by providing more on duty doctors.
Recent reports have not demonstrated that the basis of change is flawed but we have two parties arguing over the conclusions of two separate studies.
I have not bothered to read the reports so I do not know what variables have been taken into account in these reports..maybe you do.
However, i would be astonished if patients were not more likely to die at weekends for the reasons I have outlined in my previous posts describing weekend care or the lack of it.
I am not on a wind up re women in medicine...its a major problem having 2/3 of doctors being women and they are now demonstrating as a group their unwillingness to work unsocial hours...The problem I noticed over 30 years as a doctor is that serious illness showed no respect for the time of day!
I do agree that the government is trying to spread resources too thinly and that is an issue that doctors should speak out against but not desert their patients by striking..........Who voted for this government?...not me I may add but 'the people did'
if you actually believe that doctors are striking because they object to government healthcare policy then you are naive...Doctors are on strike because they want premium rates for Saturday and don't want to work any extra weekends...if the government back down on one or more of these two issues then you won't hear from the doctors again....Stuff their mouths with gold has always been the answer to doctors' objecting to healthcare policy..its always worked and will work again!
Seems to me that rather than an issue at weekends with junior doctors, the main problem cited by the government, their main reason for forcing this strike, was their perception of a 24/7 health service. Now, it is plain as day and fact that the main reason there is a problem with weekends and the death rates is nothing to do with junior doctors per se, but the fact that senior doctors don't do weekends, so instead of taking senir doctors to task, this government has picked on the junior doctors, thinking they'd roll over. What a shock they've had because it seems to me that the junior docs have forced their hand, shame on the 'senior doctors' who have belittled and berated them, like a scalpel in the back.
I wouldn't trust you as far as i could throw you, to be honest, here's the thing, and it's obvious to me, this was nothing to do with money, as plain to see as anything if you look at what the doctors have actually been saying, they havent asked for more money just a fairer distribution of the same pot. You've got an agenda which is all yours, and i don't think there's many who can see it, but there you go.
