Hospital bosses have distanced themselves from suggestions they agreed to a new junior doctors contract being imposed after their names were on a letter Jeremy Hunt used to justify the decision.
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Addressing Parliament, Hunt said that the negotiator of the government Sir David Dalton had reached to an agreement on 90% of issues with the BMA, but so far no contract agreement had been finalized by a deadline of the earlier evening.
“However, I was not asked whether I think this contract should now be imposed”.
Andrew Foster, chief executive of the Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust (FT), said the letter he and 19 other NHS leaders backed was not the one that advised the Government to do “whatever it deems necessary” to break the deadlock.
Dr Bowman, who said he then stood on the picket line “to save our NHS”, suggested he had been made to feel as though “I lack vocation, I’m overpaid and I need to work harder”.
The British Medical Association, which has been leading negotiations on behalf of junior doctors, said it would look at all options available to it in order to prevent the contract from being implemented. They include at least one who said she was unaware that her name was on the letter until it was published.
BMA chairman Dr Mark Porter said the union would “reflect” on its next steps as its current mandate for strike refers specifically to the “threat of imposition” – a threshold which has now been crossed.
Apparently I have no transferable skills to find a different job.
His post has already been shared thousands of times the same day Mr Hunt said the new contracts would be imposed on junior doctors after a bitter dispute lasting three years.
But shadow health secretary Heidi Alexander later raised a point of order in the House of Commons to suggest that Mr Hunt may have “inadvertently misled” MPs when he made his announcement, because of the withdrawal of support by chief executives.
At the last strike we asked them for their messages to patients.
“All we do is for our patients, how dare you try and turn them against us”. All of this is your government’s fault.
One doctor warned Mr Hunt he had “picked a fight with the wrong crowd”.
Go on, announce imposition, and just see what the most resilient, driven, passionate, intelligent group of people in Britain do next.
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The unprecedented and authoritarian move taken by the government has indicated towards a new stage in the efforts of the ruling elite to get rid of the NHS.
