Junior doctors are protesting in London today against possible changes to their contract hours which are being proposed by the Health Secretary.
Advertisement
Health secretary Jeremy Hunt has been slammed as “patronising” by junior doctors, after he claimed they have been misled by their own union over changes the government wants to make to their contracts.
Doctor Sheneen Meghji, 32, a junior doctor from London, said the new contract plans are “really rather terrible” and are “dire” for the NHS.
There is still the potential for doctors to go on strike after talks broke down between NHS Employers and the British Medical Association (BMA).
Dr Anna Warrington, of the protest organising committee, said: “This unprecedented protest brings together healthcare professionals and concerned public to raise awareness of the threat to our NHS from the imposed junior doctors’ contract”.
The government wants to cut the number of payments made for unsociable hours, by redefining the normal working week to include Saturdays and late evenings.
Instead of 7am to 7pm Monday to Friday doctors could be expected to work 7am to 10pm on any day.
They said they would not return until the government backed down from its proposal to extend a junior doctor’s routine working hours from 60 hours per week to 90 hours.
The protest started at Waterloo Place, and a march will move along Pall Mall and Whitehall.
In addition to the rally in London, thousands of junior doctors are also rallying in Belfast and Nottingham.
Banners carried messages such as “Save Our NHS” and “Bad decisions cost lives”. Others say “Tired doctors make mistakes” and “Quantitative easing for doctors not bankers”. One sign held high said: “Cunning Hunt’s conning health care”.
She said: “The new contracts aren’t fair or safe – we already work more hours than in our contracts”.
He added: ‘We want what is best for our patients’.
At the rally a male doctor, still wearing his NHS-issue light-blue hairnet for surgical staff, had turned a cardboard delivery box into a placard.
The crowd also enjoyed a performance of Save Our Contracts, a cover of Jessie J’s hit Pricetag penned by junior doctor Eirion Slade, who took to the stage with his guitar.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme: “This is a good deal for doctors”.
The GP and campaigner accused Mr hunt of “stubbornness” for imposing a hugely-unpopular contract on young doctors that will mean the country’s “best juniors being creamed off by lucrative contracts abroad”, while putting many bright youngsters off studying medicine altogether. What we need to do is to change the balance of pay between weekdays and weekends so that we don’t force hospitals to roster three times less medical care at weekends. “We’re stopping doctors being asked to work for five nights in a row”.
Mr Hunt said reductions in pay for working antisocial hours would be offset with an increase in basic pay.
Advertisement
But parking charges are worth around £200m a year, vital money at a time when the NHS is so financially stretched.
