NHS walkout

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I'd have thought this place would be buzzing with the strikes going on. Your thoughts?


Here is Frankie's view on it just for a bit o levity.


One of the worst things for doctors must be that, after seven years of study and then another decade of continuing professional exams, patients come in telling them they’re wrong after spending 20 minutes on Google. So imagine how doctors must feel about Jeremy Hunt, who hasn’t even had the decency to go on the internet.

Consider how desperate these doctors are: so desperate that they want to talk to Jeremy Hunt. Surely even Hunt’s wife would rather spend a sleepless 72 hours gazing into a cracked open ribcage than talk to him. Hunt won’t speak to the doctors, even though doctors are the people who know how hospitals work. Hunt’s only other job was founding Hotcourses magazine: his areas of expertise are how to bulletpoint a list and make dog grooming look like a viable career change.

Of course, the strikers are saying this is about safety, not pay, as expecting to be paid a decent wage for a difficult and highly skilled job is now considered selfish. Surely expecting someone to work for free while people all around them are dying of cancer is only appropriate for the early stages of The X Factor. Sadly, Tories don’t understand why someone would stay in a job for decency and love when their mother was never around long enough to find out what language the nanny spoke.

The fact that Hunt co-wrote a book about how to dismantle the NHS makes him feel like a broad stroke in a heavy-handed satire. Even the name Jeremy Hunt is so redolent of upper-class brutality that it feels like he belongs in one of those Martin Amis books where working-class people are called things like Dave Rubbish and Billy Darts (No shade, Martin – I’m just a joke writer: I envy real writers, their metaphors and similes taking off into the imagination sky like big birds or something). Indeed, Jeremy Hunt is so overtly ridiculous that he might be best thought of as a sort of rodeo clown, put there simply there to distract the enraged public.

I sympathise a little with Hunt – he was born into military aristocracy, a cousin of the Queen, went to Charterhouse, then Oxford, then into PR: trying to get him to understand the life of an overworked student nurse is like trying to get an Amazonian tree frog to understand the plot of Blade Runner. Hunt doesn’t understand the need to pay doctors – he’s part of a ruling class that doesn’t understand that the desire to cut someone open and rearrange their internal organs can come from a desire to help others, and not just because of insanity caused by hereditary syphilis.
The government believes that death rates are going up because doctors are lazy, rather than because we’ve started making disabled people work on building sites. Indeed, death rates in the NHS are going up, albeit largely among doctors. From the steel mines where child slaves gather surgical steel, all the way up to senior doctors working 36 hours on no sleep, the most healthy people in the NHS are actually the patients. This is before we get to plans for bursaries to be withdrawn from student nurses, so that we’re now essentially asking them to pay to work. Student nurses are essential; not only are they a vital part of staffing hospitals, they’re usually the only people there able to smile at a dying patient without screaming: “TAKE ME WITH YOU!”

The real reason more people die at weekends is that British people have to be really sick to stay in hospital at the weekend, as hospitals tend not to have a bar. We have a fairly low proportion of people who are doctors, don’t plan to invest in training any more, and are too racist to import them. So we’re shuffling around the doctors we do have to the weekend, when not a lot of people are admitted, from the week, when it’s busy. This is part of a conscious strategy to run the service down to a point where privatisation can be sold to the public as a way of improving things.

Naturally, things won’t actually be improved; they’ll be sold to something like Virgin Health. Virgin can’t get the toilets to work on a train from Glasgow to London, so it’s time we encouraged it to branch out into something less challenging like transplant surgery. With the rate the NHS is being privatised, it won’t be long before consultations will be done via Skype with a doctor in Bangalore. Thank God we’re raising a generation who are so comfortable getting naked online. “I’m afraid it looks like you’ve had a stroke. No, my mistake – you’re just buffering.”

When I was little, I was in hospital for a few days. The boy in the next bed was an officious little guy who took me on a tour of the ward. He’d sort of appointed himself as an auxiliary nurse and would help out around the place, tidying up the toys in the playroom, and giving all the nurses a very formal “Good Morning”, which always made me laugh. I got jelly and ice-cream one evening (I’d had my tonsils out) and they brought him some, too. Afterwards, he threw his spoon triumphantly into his plate and laughed till there were tears in his eyes. Then he tidied up and took our plates back to the trolley. What he meant by all this (we’d sit up at night talking and waiting for trains to go by in the distance) is that this was the first place he’d known any real kindness and he wished to return it. For most of us it will be the last place we know kindness. How sad that we have allowed it to fall into the hands of dreadful people who know no compassion at all, not even for themselves.

legendkillarV2 wrote:Actually it is.

No, no it isn't.

For one doctors don't get paid overtime.

TopHat24/7 wrote:

Pr4wn wrote:Think of the wider picture. I know multiple NHS doctors from my university days and none of them say that this is anything to do with pay. The Saturday pay negotiations failed because the government proposed nothing to lessen the already excessive workload on doctors. If Hunt fails to offer anything that sorts this out, the negotiations will collapse again.

Note that the negotiations have resumed today with the BMA agreeing to discuss Saturday pay.

Just out of curiosity, Toppy, how would you feel if your employer wanted you to work longer hours for less money?

Happens all the time. It's called working in the private sector and not relying on a bully boy trade union to fight your battles.

Doesn't answer the question though, does it mate? You have a habit of doing that.

And if the government aren't being the bully boys here then who is?

Is there something in the contract that says the nhs trust/government can change any term in their contract as and when they want?

Because if so that has to be illegal surely?

Happens all the time Shah, especially in the private sector. There'll be a line in the middle of something stating that the CEO/head of your department may need to amend these at times to get a job etc done.

I know for us it states the CO can change our working routines/hours etc if the need arises and my Dad's been telling me for years not to trust any contract you haven't written yourself :-)

Ent wrote:

legendkillarV2 wrote:Actually it is.

No, no it isn't.

For one doctors don't get paid overtime.

Their pay is the same on weekends and after 7pm weekdays as it is the rest of the time??

Pr4wn wrote:

TopHat24/7 wrote:

Pr4wn wrote:Think of the wider picture. I know multiple NHS doctors from my university days and none of them say that this is anything to do with pay. The Saturday pay negotiations failed because the government proposed nothing to lessen the already excessive workload on doctors. If Hunt fails to offer anything that sorts this out, the negotiations will collapse again.

Note that the negotiations have resumed today with the BMA agreeing to discuss Saturday pay.

Just out of curiosity, Toppy, how would you feel if your employer wanted you to work longer hours for less money?

Happens all the time. It's called working in the private sector and not relying on a bully boy trade union to fight your battles.

Doesn't answer the question though, does it mate? You have a habit of doing that.

And if the government aren't being the bully boys here then who is?

It does. How would I feel? Ambivalent. Why? Because it happens all the time. My pay is fixed, some weeks I'll only work 45 hours, some weeks I'll work 55 hours, my contract says 35 hours. My pay never changes to reflect those extra hours - I do them because that's what it takes to perform my job well.

If it got to the stage where I was permanently working 55+ hour weeks then I would approach my boss to discuss my concerns, ask for help with additional resourcing or request a pay rise. If neither came I would leave for another employer (something which I did 2 years ago).

Surprised this thread hasnt popped up again. So I'll make it pop up. What is it real forum users used to do? Ah yes

Bump

TopHat24/7 wrote:

Ent wrote:

legendkillarV2 wrote:Actually it is.

No, no it isn't.

For one doctors don't get paid overtime.

Their pay is the same on weekends and after 7pm weekdays as it is the rest of the time??

There is a banding supplement applied to the salary based on the proportion of time spent working unsocial hours.

That isn't overtime which (traditionally) is voluntary and paid at a premium rate (depending on your contract).

The equivalent would be additional locum shifts.

The nhs would be totally bankrupt if it paid its staff for additional hours worked.

My only takeaway from the recent news is that the monthly 5-day strikes may be over-zealous and was a poor political move, a move that lost NHS sympathy and played into the hands of Hunt, who with his Tory backing is obviously going to play the papers better, because they feed each other.

It's the nuclear option, the bma never thought they'd have to do any strikes in the first place.

Beginning of the end for the nhs, medical school applications down, docs dropping like flies - once this is forced through agenda for change (employment contract for most nhs employees) will be next.

Good thing Great Britain now has an extra 400 million every week to fund the NHS. Should be pretty straightforward to solve this

I think they should have a Logan's run type society. Would solve the nhs and pensions black holes in one foul swoop.

Ent wrote:It's the nuclear option, the bma never thought they'd have to do any strikes in the first place.

Beginning of the end for the nhs, medical school applications down, docs dropping like flies - once this is forced through agenda for change (employment contract for most nhs employees) will be next.

They've shot themselves well and truly in the foot with this recent decision. Who's running the Junior Doctors' position? Don't like the Mail, but they had an interesting take on who's making decisions:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3771685/EXPOSED-hard-Left-doctors-care-bashing-Tories-health.html

As for less applications? You're kidding right? The medical school I have links with is massively over-subscribed, even through the recent A-level results for the 2016-17 entry. Grad entry is obscenely popular as well. If you're talking about quality of entrant, I'm not so sure, but in sheer numbers, there's no real sign of it falling off just yet.