I don't understand though, I thought that pay was hardly going to be affected? I also don't understand the effort to conflate the two sides as having been acting similarly.
I'm also not sure I particularly understand this drive recently, both by the government and wings of the right wing media, especially the times, to paint doctors as some kind of Marxist militants? Does anybody actually believe this? That doctors are all left wing hippies and/ or marxists who are agitating for a fight with the government? Because doctors and the bma have such a history of industrial action and fighting with governments? Doctors are generally quite representative of the general population. There are greens, labour, Lib dems and tories. Even a few ukipers too. There are a LOT of tories amongst doctors.
I'm a doctor. Patient safety is already compromised currently. I've been at trusts where the accident and emergency middle grades (registrars) are not atls trained. They are all locums. That is disastrous. They cannot full the posts. Every single hospital around the country, especially dghs struggle terribly to fill on call rotas, even with locums. Basildon dgh, who have only just come out of special measures, have had to reduce the total number of doctors working on nights and increase all of their normal staffs night shifts because they cannot fill the rota. My current hospital has 4 gaps in the elderly care sho rota next rotation (as well as multiple registrar gaps). This is getting worse and worse and worse. We've been trying the best we can to cope but for so many reasons, this will make it worse. That I can assure you 100%. People can blithely accuse doctors as they want. They can think they're militant, lazy, greedy, whatever. That is the reality however and this contract will only make things worse.
And those who think it will be easy to just replace them with foreign doctors.... I would ask if it was that easy, why, with the severe problems we already have in staffing, this hasn't already happened? And why indeed many of the foreign doctors who come... End up leaving again?
I'm not sure tbh. I think from the very beginning, the contract was worse and always likely to be worse than it already is. The doctors contract and general condition have endured a good 10-20 years of getting worse, in terms of training, pay, perks etc. And I don't believe anything the tories have to say about the NHS after the past couple of years, so not really sure what they could say to convince me (or the majority of doctors) that this commitment would be honoured?
I'll be completely honest, I feel my (admittedly very long) post answered a lot of this and it's a bit difficult to take a bit out of the post without the rest but I'll answer anyway. We already have a 24/7 NHS. All junior doctors work nights and weekends. 99.7% of consultants do weekends. If that's what hunt us referring to, he's a lying idiot.
If he wants an elective weekend service, he will need to increase the funding of the NHS by 40% and increase the number of doctors and other staff by at least 20-30%.
I've already said for me, this isn't really about pay. It is about conditions, feeling appreciated for the job I do rather than attacked and ensuring patient safety.
Would I like more pay? Yes. Am I going to fight for that? No, I'm not that bothered by it. Am I going to be happy working more unsociable hours for less pay? Again, no I'm not. I'm not going to work this rota, it's not a rota compatible with a decent family life. Some doctors may agree to work more unsociable hours for more money, which is fair enough. I am more interested in doing a job where I actually occasionally get to see my family though. I don't think that's unreasonable and I don't think most people would agree to work longer, more unsociable hours, see their family less and for a severe payout, especially as, as I said in my previous post, the pay in real terms for Junior doctors has already decreased a lot.
The removal of pay protection is the cherry on the cake. You're focusing on pay and especially pay protection again when I've articulated that pay is not the primary issue here for many doctors.
They're also not going to get more nurses. Hospitals are again already struggling to fill nursing posts. The removal of nursing bursaries by the government is going to make it even harder to recruit home grown nurses to do the degree and the foreign recruitment is not enough for demand.
Again, I'll repeat the point that I and others such as cheesy have been making on this thread. I think most of the staff in the NHS are conscientious. Most of us work hard and have the best interests of our patients at heart. Most of us will stay late (and often do) to look after patients. You can believe that or think we're mostly lefty, money grabbing louts. Either way, we are all normal people. And the crux of that is that we function like normal people. Make the conditions unattractive, the contract unattractive, the pay unattractive, demonise us in the media and you may find that hospitals struggle to fill posts in both doctor and nursing rotas (which happens on a pretty much daily basis in most hospitals around the hospital and despite the incredibly high percentage of foreign doctors and nurses).
Eventually, you may have to ask yourself whether to help retention and recruitment, it may be a good idea to improve rather than worsen conditions?
