Jeremy Hunt and senior ministers have insisted they must win the battle with junior doctors, who are staging a historic walkout that will disrupt services including maternity, accident and emergency and intensive care.
Junior doctors to go on all-out strike – Q&A
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The health secretary dashed any lingering hopes of a last-minute compromise when he told MPs that he was determined to impose the unpopular new contract to help turn the NHS into a seven-day service.
The strike is running from 8am to 5pm on Tuesday and Wednesday. A&E and maternity units will be staffed almost entirely by senior consultants
as hospitals pull out the stops to ensure patient care is as safe as normal.
A very large majority of junior doctors are likely to strike, with only a tiny number expected to defy the picket lines, although the exact figures will be closely scrutinised.
In a combative performance in the Commons, Hunt said: “No trade union has the right to veto a manifesto promise voted for by the British people. We are proud of the NHS as one of our greatest institutions but we must turn that pride into actions and a seven-day service will help us turn the NHS into one of the highest quality healthcare systems in the world.”
FacebookTwitterPinterest Junior doctors hold a candlelit vigil outside the Department of Health on Monday night. Photograph: Guy Bell/Rex/Shutterstock
The government sees the long-running wrangle as a dispute it cannot afford to lose and David Cameron and George Osborne fully back what critics see as Hunt’s uncompromising tactics, Whitehall sources told the Guardian. Ministers fear that capitulation to British Medical Association demands to change the terms and conditions Hunt will force England’s 45,000 junior doctors to work under from August might encourage other public sector trade unions.
“With all negotiations if you buckle at the end you send out a message to other union groups that you’ll back down,” one Whitehall source said.
Some ministers are privately describing the bust-up with doctors in training as “a miners’ moment – a dispute we cannot lose”, in a reference to Margaret Thatcher’s struggle with the National Union of Mineworkers in 1984-85. “That phrase is being heard inside government. Ministers see the junior doctors’ dispute in that light. They say that there’s no going back,” said a second Whitehall senior source familiar with the ministers’ thinking.
NHS doctor: why I won’t be withholding emergency care
Caroline Davies
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Patients needing NHS care unexpectedly on Wednesday have been warned to expect longer waits than usual in A&E and GP surgeries, which will also be trying to relieve the strain on hospitals by looking after some of the less seriously unwell. Almost 13,000 planned operations and another 113,000 outpatient appointments have become casualties of the escalation of the dispute, which will make Saturdays and weekday evenings between 7pm and 10pm part of a junior doctor’s normal working week for the first time.
At issue is the new contract that Hunt intends to impose on all doctors below the level of consultant from August, as part of plans to introduce a “trulyseven-day NHS”. The heart of the dispute is whether some or all of Saturday should be part of a junior doctor’s core working hours.
Amid ministerial frustration at the BMA’s resort to all-out strikes Hunt hinted in parliament that A&E doctors, as important public servants, could be banned from going on strike in future, as members of the armed forces already are.
Responding to Tory MP Andrew Bridgen’s suggestion that emergency care doctors, “the most highly remunerated of our public servants”, could be “barred by law from taking action”, Hunt said: “On his broader point, I agree. When someone is paid a high salary, that comes with the responsibilities of a profession.
FacebookTwitterPinterestJunior doctor resigns live on ITV ahead of strike over Jeremy Hunt’s contract
“That is why, however much people disagree with the new contract, and however much they may not agree with the government’s plans for a seven-day NHS, it is totally inappropriate to withdraw emergency care in the way that will happen tomorrow and the next day. That is why doctors should be very careful about the impact this will have on their status in the country.”
In sometimes heated scenes in the Commons Heidi Alexander, Labour’s shadow health secretary, strongly criticised Hunt’s handling of the dispute. “How can it be safe to impose a contract when no one knows what the impact will be on recruitment and retention but everyone fears the worst?” she asked the health secretary.
The BMA blamed Hunt’s intransigence for this week’s strikes. “We have made a repeated and genuine offer to the health secretary; lift the imposition and we will call off this action. Jeremy Hunt has rejected this and so responsibility for this action now rests squarely with the government,” said Dr Johann Malawana, the chair of the BMA’s junior doctors committee.
He rejected Hunt’s claim that Saturday was the only outstanding issue dividing the two sides. “The health secretary himself has admitted there are serious outstanding concerns about excessive working hours, training, recruitment and retention and the impact these have on the ability of the NHS to deliver a seven-day service,” Malawan added.
Earlier on Monday, Cameron rejected a last-ditch attempt by 14 medical royal colleges to intervene so that the strikes could be stopped and peace talks resumed. Leaders of Britain’s GPs, hospital doctors and other specialisms warned the prime minister that the row “poses a significant threat to our whole healthcare system by demoralising a group of staff on whom the future of the NHS depends”.
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Lord Winston, the doctor and Labour peer, said Hunt was making “a massive mistake” by imposing the contract. “There really is a need for a compromise and I think that the doctors would be happy to accept a compromise. These are altruistic people and they don’t want to strike, they don’t want to withdraw their labour. And obviously the hope is that patients will not be damaged, but even delaying operations is not great.”
More than half of junior doctors are thinking about quitting the NHS in England in protest at the contract Jeremy Hunt is forcing on them, according to a new survey.
The research said difficulty in arranging childcare and the impact of working even more anti-social shifts on doctors’ relationships with their partners and children were the key reasons for the widespread disillusionment it uncovered.
More than 52% of the respondents said they were likely to or will definitely give up medicine, or are considering moving to Wales, Scotland or abroad to avoid working under the health secretary’s new terms and conditions from August.
“Jeremy Hunt’s rush to impose the contract threatens to create a potential timebomb that could explode as early as August as thousands of junior doctors struggle to find childcare or quit their jobs,” said Dr Sethina Watson, a trainee anaesthetist in Bristol, who carried out the survey.
An Ipsos Mori opinion poll published on Tuesday shows that 57% of voters back all-out strikes, and that support for that tactic has risen from the 44% it found when it asked the same question in January. But the number of people who blame both sides for the dispute has risen, from 28% to 35%, over the same period.
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