Today saw the start of the 16th strike by the Junior doctors, who want to use the more grown-up name of Residents, and frankly, that is enough to say no, we are going to call you what you are: junior. Junior and need to grow up and be actual doctors.
Proper moral doctors would not have had one strike, not one. Why? Because strikes kill patients, and doctors are meant to do anything not to kill patients.
We have already seen patients dying due to the doctor’s strike. It’s a no-brainer to work out why, when stats tell us that being admitted to hospital during the weekend has worse outcomes than Mon-Thur – why?
Low staff and mainly juniors. So when juniors walk out from Tuesday to Sunday, the writing is on the wall. Strikes do and will kill people.
You may think that their reason for striking is a good one, but you may also be hard pushed to identify what that reason is. It has changed over time. Initially, it was about a 22 per cent pay increase.
They say their pay should be restored to 2008 levels, but most of them were not even doctors in 2008, so it is a nonsensical comparison.
Research by the Nuffield Trust—hardly known for a right-leaning stance—shows that if a more reasonable benchmark is used, such as a decade ago, when most were at least doctors or in training, they have in fact seen a pay increase relative to that cohort. Of course, that does not fit their narrative.
When that was wearing thin with the public after they got a massive 22 +5.4 per cent pay rise from Labour, they changed the reason. They said it was about conditions and job prospects, and here I am with them.
Conditions experienced by today's doctors are markedly worse than those of three decades ago and have been declining over that time.
The training system means that they move jobs every four to six months, usually to a different hospital, always to a different department.
They need to be ‘signed off’ at every stage, so when things are bad, they consider how long they have before moving on and keep their head down – nothing changes.
That includes being bullied by permanent staff members, often nurses, rotas that are not adequately covered so they are working in an unsafe environment, no on-call facilities, no training opportunities – the list is long. So here they have a case, but no amount of pay will change the dissatisfaction caused by these issues.
Previous doctors didn’t have this; they did their training, they worked in teams, they knew their patients, they bonded with their colleagues, and whilst they did longer and more on-calls, they were appreciated and looked after.
Doctors' strikes are not about pay rises. The real reason is truly sickening - Renee Hoenderkamp | Getty Images
They had proper on-call rooms, staff canteens with fresh food cooked for them (not a vending machine), and the nurses didn’t bully them but tried to make their lives better in return for their hard work. When this value of staff is lost, and it has been lost, then you have nothing.
And then let's consider how and where they get their training jobs. When I qualified, my training job and location were based on the basis of how well I did in my medical degree and final results.
If you imagine 5000 jobs UK-wide, the choice of jobs was awarded on the basis of achievement. So the harder you worked, the better your marks, the smaller the choice of jobs you had to list in preference.So of those 5000 jobs, I only had to list 12 that I wanted. This was important to me; I was married, I had a child, and they were based in London. I needed a sought-after job in a prestigious London Teaching hospital, and I worked really hard to get one, as a reward for my achievement.
Now, this system has been binned. Because everyone has to be a winner to save the sadness of those who didn’t achieve so well, now it's a lottery.
Jobs from Newcastle to Land's End are allocated randomly. If my job had been outside of London, I would have had the unenviable choice of leaving my family and uprooting or not having a job.
That is barbaric. Unfortunately, in life, you can’t make everyone a winner, and any attempt to do so makes everyone a loser. Losers in medicine are invariably unhappy.
Couple that with sought-after training jobs going to foreign-born and qualified doctors, leaving thousands of UK-qualified doctors without a training post after years of hard work and a massive student debt to service; you would expect them to be unhappy. Streeting has made some moves to rectify this, giving British-qualified doctors priority over jobs, which is long overdue.
There is apparently something very special about these highly paid professionals that means they need extra protection from cost-of-living assaults over and above the porters and cleaners in the hospitals in which they work.
Or is it something else? Is there something more at play here than a real desire to see better pay and conditions? Are they making unacceptable demands to ensure that they can’t reach a settlement and strike?
The BMA Juniors branch has been changed beyond recognition over the last 5-10 years; it's been infiltrated.
They didn’t seem to understand that the Junior doctors despised the Tory government, and they despise this Labour one too. This is about regime change and bringing down the government, and it's sickening.
Sickening that every minute they are not at work is another minute contributing to patients dying, waiting lists growing, cancers not being detected and ill health embedding.
Add to that the £3BILLION that the last 15 strikes have cost the NHS, and the damage is compounded, the harm furthered and the good that this money could have done, wasted.
So all things considered, whilst these juniors do have some areas that need to be improved, this is not the way to do it. Harming patients, forgetting their promise to first do no harm, discarding public opinion, is not the way. Its immoral. Its unkind, Its not what doctors are meant to do.