doctors on strike

Your posts are very funny.

the BMA has effectively run a massive bullying campaign on social media is that it never intended to compromise on anything.

This got the biggest laugh from me

Out of interest did you ever write a dossier for Tony?

This got the biggest laugh from me

Yes, that was a good one, but I prefer:

Doctors have been systematically misled by their union

in defence of a Health Secretary who continually misused studies of the “weekend effect” even after the fallacy of his statements was exposed in the clearest possible terms, and then claimed support for his contract imposition from people who had never given that support.

I like this one.

The principles underpinning the changes to the contract they say can’t work are already the basis of contracts worked by hundreds of thousands of nurses, paramedics

No they’re really not. We have as strict as possible working time regulations, we can’t force staff to do more than 5 shifts in a row, they must have 11 hours off between shifts, we try to make sure they get the breaks they’re entitled to sadly that often fails. The working week is 37.5 hours worked out over 13 weeks so nothing like Dr’s at all.

No they’re really not. We have as strict as possible working time regulations, we can’t force staff to do more than 5 shifts in a row, they must have 11 hours off between shifts, we try to make sure they get the breaks they’re entitled to sadly that often fails. The working week is 37.5 hours worked out over 13 weeks so nothing like Dr’s at all.

Yes, but apart from that j5m is completely correct.

Oh look – more lies …

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/feb/14/junior-doctors-jeremy-hunt-conservatives-event-fareham

Just 5 minutes? I’d have thought it would take longer than that to read the Telegraph and Daily Mail to get these opinions?! I challenge you, whoever you are (Hunt’s godson?) to come to a BMA meeting and meet these “misled” people. You trust them with your life yet don’t believe they can see through the obfuscation of the lies propogated by this government to suit their ends. Believe me if we felt that more people were dying at weekends due to doctors staffing we would all be at work.

This is the very opposite of what will happen

Excellent post, speedstar – especially regarding the likely effect upon on-call registrars. Given existing gaps in acute care rotas, it’s extraordinary that they should be penalised.

Doctors have been systematically misled by their union

Yes, because thousands of highly-trained medics are entirely incapable of thinking for themselves.

You are beyond satire.

As for bullying on social media – what, like (repeatedly) pointing out Hunt’s abuse of stats? Or how his 7 day rhetoric remains unfunded and dangerously unworkable (e.g. the excellent @bendean1979 on Twitter)? Or how the welcome goal of uniform provision (+/- certain elective stuff) will not be achieved by stretching 5 day resourcing over 7? Or why an imposed contract will worsen existing recruitment issues? And – above all – why this presents a threat to patient safety?

he has personally had very little to do with the negotiations

Other than imposing this damn stupid contract and cooking-up a spurious case for it. The unease of FT execs (see the ongoing “signaturegate”) speaks volumes.

Now imagine all this squeeze coming from EU-SSR where the bureaucrats dictate to the ministers of the member state to ” …deal with it …” or else … 😯

Does anyone become a doctor for the 9-5? Surely no junior doctor thought they’d work Monday to Friday 9-5: personally, I’m self-employed and so have the luxury of working 7 days a week in an industry where it’s deemed ok that you can contact me on high days and holidays. I’ve had calls and even visitors – ‘we were just passing’ – on New Year’s Day, Christmas Day, Mother’s Day.. Yet I greet each and every one with a smile. And to supplement the inevitable quiet times I do agency work for the profession I am qualified to do.
It seems the NHS is in financial and workforce freefall so maybe it’s time to admit defeat and start charging?

bex – Member

Does anyone become a doctor for the 9-5? Surely no junior doctor thought they’d work Monday to Friday 9-5:

Absolutely none of this is about working 9-5.

Absolutely none of this is about working 9-5

No it’s about money

Doctors are a well paid mobile workforce where demand outstrips supply

They are part of the top 1% of the workforce and expect to treated like that or will exercise their mobility by moving or becoming locums

They feel its demeaning that unsocial hours might be paid without an appropriate enhancement to reflect the additional commitment

They will also retire early as the latest pension reforms mean that working beyond a point where their pension pot is valued >£1million they no longer get tax relief and so might as well retire

They also make important decisions which affect your quality or extent of life so unless you are very lucky you need them

At the end of the day you just need to doff your cap and throw money at them

And remember mid staffs was the NHS managers not the doctors killing people

So in summary, throw money at them. AKA, stuff their pockets with gold

Jeebus some of the posters on this thread make me weep.

Some just have a different political view, and that’s fair enough. Not the way I see it, but interesting to hear the viewpoint from the other side of the fence.

But others seem to be motivated purely out of spite and the idea that anyone who is better off than them deserves to get shafted and has no right to complain about it. That’s just sad. 😕

FWIW:

teef said>
It doesn’t seem to have even crossed your mind that you’re overpaid – entitlement syndrome? ..
I’ve been in a job and had a 10% pay cut – didn’t like it but it was the circumstances the time.
Arrogant know all syndrome?

Out of interest, when you got your 10% cut did your boss publicly tell everyone it was actually an 11% pay rise?

And did he also denounce you as being responsible for 6,000 deaths because you had a “9 till 5 culture” and “lacked vocation” despite the fact that A) that wasn’t what the research said and B) he knew fine well that you already worked nights and weekends and weren’t even remotely 9 till 5.

bex said>
Does anyone become a doctor for the 9-5? Surely no junior doctor thought they’d work Monday to Friday 9-5

Correct, they didn’t.
And the strikes weren’t about them wanting to work 9-5 either.

big_n_daft said>
No it’s about money
….At the end of the day you just need to doff your cap and throw money at them

At no point during this strike have the junior doctors asked for more money.

They don’t want to be paid less than they currently are – who would? Especially when the public are being told it is a pay rise.

But the bigger issue is that the banding system was originally brought in to discourage trusts from speccing rotas with stupidly long unsociable hours, because doing so would cost them money.

That safeguard has worked well.

Too well, because the Tories realise that in order to spread five days worth of staff over seven days they’ll need to get doctors to work stupidly long unsociable hours again – so they need to “reform” by reducing the safeguard and replacing it with a toothless alternative with no financial penalty.

Still I’m sure things will be so much better with a privatised NHS.

I see for example that a private firm Alliance Medical (whose board includes Malcolm Rifkind MP) have just been awarded an £80 million contract for cancer screening, despite an NHS consortium putting in a bid that was £7 million cheaper.

That’s the kind of private sector efficiencies you just can’t get in the public sector eh? 🙄

What’s baffling is that whoever is feeding the press from the Dr’s point of view is doing a staggeringly bad job of it….it’s actually quite simple, I had the misfortune of treating a local politician who counts Hunt as a friend….she asked me why NHS staff were up in arms about an 11% pay rise?….

…to her it was that simple, as far as she (and the media seem to believe) we’re all getting an 11% pay rise and are being unreasonable and ungrateful about it.

I explained to her that my salary currently enjoys a 25% unsocial enhancement for working nights, bank holidays, weekends and public holidays (christmas, New year etc)….the current proposals are to take this away and replace it with the much heralded 11% ‘rise’…..problem is that if you take 25% of my salary and just replace it with 11% I have a shortfall (or pay cut) of 14% in reality.

The old bird wasn’t a bad lass actually and once I’d explained it to her like that she was disgusted…..the problem is this basic illustration doesn’t seem to be getting through on the news, instead it’s being lost in the hysteria about privatisation of the NHS….that may or may not happen but it’s not the issue here.
For a supposedly bright workforce the junior DR’s seem to be muddying the waters and diluting their own case by going off on rants about the destruction of the NHS, to the casual listener it’s hyperbole and people switch off.

Stick to the point about pay and hammer it home time after time after time….make the press, the public and the politicians understand completely that this is a pay cut….taking away existing unsocial hours enhancements (which often total 25%+ of an NHS workers salary) and replacing with an 11% ‘rise’ is actually a 14% cut….stick to that argument and you might get more of the public onboard because the general public don’t have the attention span to work out all the nuances of this debacle.

Ultimately the biggest losers with be the public, the NHS will become nothing more than a training ground for nurses, doctors and paramedics to learn, qualify and then leave for more money elsewhere….leaving the general public to be treated by very junior staff while those who can afford insurance will get the benefit of being treated by the more experienced clinicians that left the NHS over this scandal.

You can’t blame Dr’s for what the press report.

The pay rise is now 13.5%, the government has increased it, likewise they have conceded a Saturday supplement to any doctor who has to work 1 in 4 and finally pay is protected for all but those whose hours are not compliant.

The Observer’s leader yesterday seems to me a pretty reasonable summary of the dispute.

It’s actually not a “pay rise” of 13.5%. It’s actually an average of the increase in amount of basic pay “on transition” from an old pay point to a new one. Some juniors will therefore get up to a 25% pay rise. The most senior “junior doctors” are getting a 2% pay rise.

This is offset by the loss of the 40-50% banding that was received for the unsocial hours payment.

The present safeguards were brought in about 10 years ago – this was at the time my wife was working an average 85hr week – this was for an 18 month period – she worked a split weekend every other weekend. Do we really want to remove these safeguards ?

Her normal week was a 36hr shift every tuesday (9am tuesday to 6pm wednesday without any sleep) with 9 to 5 (usually 7 ) every other day

Weekend was either:
Friday 9am to saturday 9am then Sunday 9am to Monday 6pm
Or
Saturday 9am to Sunday 9am

I used to regularly chat with other medics who had done 48 or 27 hr shift with maybe an hour or 2 sleep every night

Do we really think this is the best way to have our doctors well rested and able to make decisions ?

One thing I haven’t heard is where is the extra funding coming from to to employ all the extra people to run a full 7 day shift pattern ? the ohs budget is £116.4 billion this year- so what would it cost to bring us up to a full 7 days ?

Btw the NHS is cheap for what it offers – have a look here at health expenditure per head – most developed countries spend a fair amount more than us per head :

The pay rise is now 13.5%, the government has increased it

Yep, all part of the “greedy doctors” spin.

First they make the story that doctors are striking over an 11% rise, then they say, look your strikes are killing people, we can go to 13.5% but no more!

Unfortunately a lot of people are fooled by this spin and deceit (see the lady in deviant’s comment above), even though Hunt himself describes the changes as “cost neutral”.

Yup. TBH if this was a board game or something that’d be a great move. But they’re supposed to be running the NHS not beating it with clever, unscrupulous moves.

deviant – Member

What’s baffling is that whoever is feeding the press from the Dr’s point of view is doing a staggeringly bad job of it

STW victim blaming 😆

I see for example that a private firm Alliance Medical (whose board includes Malcolm Rifkind MP) have just been awarded an £80 million contract for cancer screening, despite an NHS consortium putting in a bid that was £7 million cheaper.

The contract award was more than a year ago and Malcolm Rifkind is quite rightly no longer an MP. It’s quite likely the procurement took into account a range of factors in the award criteria – cost is thankfully almost never the sole criteria.

Interesting post deviant and link mefty – thx

A little closer to the non-spin reality of events in both cases

It’s quite likely the procurement took into account a range of factors in the award criteria – cost is thankfully almost never the sole criteria.

I’d be interested to know what those other criteria might be because it seems a bit odd that a private firm could make better diagnosises, using the same scanner and most likely the same NHS staff or at least staff with the same NHS training.

And if they can then wouldn’t £7 million go a long way to bringing the NHS team up to the same standard?

Personally I think any contract paid for by public money should be published in full along with the procurement and decision documents

Ah more lies and disappearing Hunts.

Doctors paid £15 a ticket to attend an event with Jeremy Hunt. He got wind of this, quietly moved the event to a different location and told the doctors it was “cancelled”.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-hunt-talk-goes-ahead-after-doctors-were-told-it-was-cancelled-a6873546.html

I dunno, on the fence about this one, if you’re planning to go to an event to disrupt it or hassle a guest, I don’t think you can complain too much if someone uses a little fib to deter you.

Maybe it’s time to bring out the big guns

IMO, that Observer editorial does not adequately address either the weakening of existing safeguards – or the effect of the net pay cut on the worsening recruitment situation. There are already significant rota gaps in acute specialties. This contract will not remedy them.

It’s fast-becoming academic, anyway – what matters is how patients and clinical staff will be experiencing this on the ground. It will be a world away from DoH spin.

I’d be interested to know what those other criteria might be because it seems a bit odd that a private firm could make better diagnosises, using the same scanner and most likely the same NHS staff or at least staff with the same NHS training.

The contract didn’t go to a “private firm”. It’s a consortium comprising the The Christie NHS Foundation Trust – which is well known for it’s world class cancer diagnosis / treatments, as well as other local NHS Trusts, charitable providers and academic institutions.

Alliance Medical seem to be bringing new technology and expertise of driving process efficiency to the party – which has the potential to reduce wait times and increase early detection. Both of which can lead to improvements in cancer outcomes. The UK continues to have amongst the worst cancer survival rates in Europe so maintaining the current status quo clearly hasn’t worked.

“…. seem to be bringing new technology and expertise of driving process efficiency to the party”.

Ex-oncology nurse here. What are these, can you elaborate?

the BMA has effectively run a massive bullying campaign on social media is that it never intended to compromise on anything.

Really? Where?

The government is trying to win over the Daily Mail reader, and quite frankly succeeding on that front at the minute.

There was an NHS bashing article in the DM last week. A senior GP responded saying he couldn’t see why doctors had a problem with their 11% pay rise, and they should just shut up and get on with it. Of course this went down very well with the DM readership.

Mrs FD spent all of 2 mins googling him. He’s a government advisor, and on their payroll 🙄

bringing new technology and expertise of driving process efficiency

Is that straight from the press release ? 😀

just5minutes – Member

The UK continues to have amongst the worst cancer survival rates in Europe…

largely due to late diagnosis, which is in no small part down to our national tendency to ignore symptoms.

just5minutes any particular ideas why we have the worse cancer survival rates in Europe (by a very marginal amount) is it because our NHS is shit or is it because our population are less well paid , or because the French and Italians have better diets or the Germans are more health concious or because of our massive drinking culture.

“Driving process efficiency” we have that in my world with GOAMY and G4S it means cutting pay alienating staff and inventing reasons why failure is some other organisations fault.

G4S

means failure anyway, doesn’t it ?

The contract didn’t go to a “private firm”. It’s a consortium

Where did you get that from?

No mention of a consortium on the Alliance Medical website which proudly says it is “Europe’s leading independent provider of medical imaging services…. uniting technical excellence and exceptional service in a business model that delivers outstanding value for money”

Alliance Medical seem to be bringing new technology

They’ll be using the SAME SCANNER that the NHS would use, the “£3 million PET/CT scanner was installed a year ago at the Royal Stoke University Hospital thanks to a grant, a bequest and £250,000 from a fund-raising appeal.“

Incidentally, Malcolm Rifkind gets £60,000 pa for his position as a non-Executive Director at Alliance Medical, which apparently involves going to ten meetings a year. I wonder why an ex-defence minister is worth so much to them? 😯

he UK continues to have amongst the worst cancer survival rates in Europe so maintaining the current status quo clearly hasn’t worked.

Yup ruining the moral of Jr docs, spreading lies about them in the media, cutting their pay and getting rid of their pay increments whilst carrying out research and specialist training in cancer is obviously going to make things better 😳

Whatever the government has been doing recently they’ve been making a bad situation worse

As for rifkind? After quitting after his cash for access revelations its obvious he was bent, and Jeremy Hunt refused to reveal whether he’d been involved in awarding the alliance cancer contract, even 5mins can’t be gullible enough to believe that it wasnt dodgy 🙄

In short, they believe in breaking down the historic boundaries and silos that get in the way of truly progressive and innovative community-based patient care. Forging collaborative partnerships both inside and outside the public sector is a natural and essential extension of this.

Or I could have just cut and pasted that BS from their website. You guess which 🙂

They’re so convincing as the language they use is so accessible. You know you can trust people when they declare their commitment with such passion and simple clarity

In short, they believe in breaking down the historic boundaries NHS and silossocial care that get in the way of truly progressiveneo-liberal ideology and innovative community-based patient careJobs for the boys. Forging collaborative partnerships both inside and outside the public sector is a natural and essential extension of this.

:-)See I re-wrote it for them stripping out the BS.

Kimbers – there’s a pretty good explanation for the CRUK trend above which is that there has been a very substantial increase in the number of patients being referred for diagnosis in Secondary Care.

This “front loading” and long lead time in increasing diagnostic capacity (Machines and skilled people to use them) leads to the %age of patients starting treatment going down i.e. more patients diagnosed but same number of staff available for helping patients to commence treatment.

Between 2010 and 2014 the number of patients referred for an urgent cancer diagnosis increased by 53% to 1.5m. The significant increase in the number of urgent referrals also has the effect of leading to small delays in first treatments for patients who have smaller / less aggressive cancers where the risk factors of starting treatment later are lower.