The proposed terms of the new contract include a pay cut of up to 30% for those in a few specialties and the reclassification of “normal working hours” to include Saturdays and later evening finishes, moving from 7pm to 10pm.
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Given 77% of doctors are women, this will inevitably lead to a massive gender pay gap in the NHS.’ Georgie feels the same: ‘The NHS has been a great place to work for women, but if these contracts come in, we’ll leave in droves.
But the BMA argues that Mr Hunt has failed to offer any guarantees on key issues such as pay and protection for doctors who wish to work less than full-time or take parental leave.
Junior doctors already face intense pressure but new contracts slashing pay – which penalise women in particular – have sparked mass protests.
According to media reports, the health minister responsible for negotiating with junior doctors, Ben Gummer, is under fire for wrongly telling a fellow Conservative MP that junior doctors can now opt out of working at weekends and in the evenings and overnight.
NHS England is facing a walkout as junior doctors are being balloted for strike action from Thursday 5 November to protest at changes to their contracts from August 2016. “The proposals will improve patient safety by better supporting a better NHS”, a spokesperson for the Department of Health said.
“I just wonder what his end-game is because he’s alienating a generation of Junior Doctors who the NHS and its patients rely on”.
Dr Malawana continued: “The Health Secretary has accused junior doctors of misleading the public over the impact of his changes, yet at the same time he continues to conflate junior doctors’ legitimate concerns and the Government’s rhetoric on seven-day services. We do want to change the pay structures that force hospitals to roster three times less medical cover at weekends as they do in weeks”, Hunt said.
Junior doctors and medical royal colleges joined hands to voice against Hunt’s threat and if ever, he decides to go ahead with this decision then the junior doctors will have to quit the NHS to work overseas.
The study in question – published in the BMJ in September – analysed hospital records and highlighted what it called a “weekend effect”, with 11,000 excess deaths from Friday to Monday in a year between 2013 and 2014.
She said that health secretary misused the findings of the analysis and asked him to clarify statements he has made in relation to it.
“This clearly implies that you believe these excess deaths are avoidable”.
“It appears Mr Hunt deliberately and knowingly misquoted and misinterpreted the conclusions of a medical research publication in an attempt to mislead the other members of Parliament and the United Kingdom public”, they said in the letter.
“The BMJ authors themselves acknowledge that – and any debate about precisely how numerous thousands of deaths are avoidable misses the point”.
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But the government said there was enough evidence to support the claims.
