Do junior doctors just care about the money?

All this is trickery mate. Basically they want people to take a substantial pay cut for work they're already doing.

Doctors do care about people but they're human beings who need to enjoy their lives too - they're smart and capable people.

Let me summarise by saying...

Doctors care more about people that your banker or lawyer does. And the saints and charity workers of this world are not smart enough to be doctors.

you can get more out of your assets if you use them for 7 (rather than 5) days a week.

If they wanted lots of free time, why become doctors? They probably knew from the off that it came with long hours.

1. We're not 'assets', we're human beings.
2. You missed the point about how it will be no use bringing in more doctors on the weekend if you don't apply the same rules to everyone else who makes weekday hospital services run.
3. You're not going to get a lot out of your 'assets' if they're all either run ragged and having to take time off as a result, or moving abroad to get away from this ****storm.

Of course they knew there were going to be long hours.

Just imagine for a second that you've chosen a career like that: long hours, and not just that, but unsociable hours - nights, weekends, public holidays - you know you'll be working them all. Fine. Then someone comes along and says they're going to take away the extra remuneration you get for most of those unsociable hours, and at the same time take away the safeguards that currently stop your hospital forcing you to work an unreasonable number of those unsociable hours. So you're going to be working more antisocial hours (likely more hours altogether, actually).. and you're getting a significant pay cut for your trouble. Are you honestly saying you'd be happy with that?

Funny how those claims come from left wing media based on old information.

"assets" = buildings, equipment. not people.

Funny how those claims come from left wing media based on old information.

If they cared about saving lives, would they strike? Leaving people at risk and leaving consultants to cover their work?

No-one wants to strike. If you or anyone else has a sensible alternative suggestion though (other than 'just put up with being screwed over', that is) then I know the BMA would love to hear it.

FYI, strikes are actually associated with a reduction in patient deaths (likely due, at least in part, to the fact that elective surgery doesn't tend to take place during strikes). People aren't 'left at risk'; they're left in the very capable hands of the most senior doctors in the hospital (who, by the way, are fully backing the strike as a body).

Pretty accurate with one problem, there is no conclusive evidence for a "7-day NHS" as A+E already exists and the majority of people using GPs are happy to do it on weekends. The paper itself concludes that no conclusions can be drawn from the study.

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Take action outside of work? Enter in negotiations? Accept the fact that wages will rise slowly? (They've been given an 11% pay rise for crying out loud!)

Elective surgeries don't happen, so some people miss out. Fair.

Those aren't the shift patterns, those are just the hours which determine the rate of pay.

I.e. 10pm will now receive normal working hours pay, rather than anti-social pay which is slightly higher.

Others have already explained the stuff about the hours.

The 'seven-day NHS' business is government spin. The NHS is already a seven-day service; if you get ill on the weekend, it doesn't matter: A&E and emergency theatres open 24 hours a day, every day. Some GPs open on Saturdays, and so do some walk-in centres. What the NHS doesn't normally do on the weekend is routine procedures and surgeries - things that aren't urgent or life-threatening. The government are trying to argue that we should be doing those non-urgent things on Saturdays and Sundays, despite the fact that the available evidence suggests patients don't want to go into hospital on a Saturday or Sunday for elective surgery. They also neglect the fact that just bringing in more doctors on the weekend will be fairly pointless without upping all of the other staff too: the nurses, the radiographers, the lab technicians, the porters, and many more besides. For all services to be available on every day of the week, we need all the other people that make those services happen on a Monday to Friday, too.

What you suggest about shifting rotas around makes sense, except for the fact that lots of hospitals are already understaffed on weekdays as it is. The government aren't suggesting we train higher numbers of doctors, so all that will happen if we rota more doctors to work weekends is that we'll have even fewer in the week. The government is basically trying to take the existing workforce and spread it more thinly (whilst cutting doctors' pay, I might add), when there's no good evidence that this will benefit anyone anyway (the oft-quoted data on 'excess weekend deaths' is extremely flawed - not least of all because it classes the 'weekend' as Friday to Monday.. but more on that another time).

Hope that clears things up a little!

If they cared about saving lives, would they strike? Leaving people at risk and leaving consultants to cover their work?

They've been trying to negotiate for three years. The Department of Health has a set of preconditions for the new contract that it has - up until now - refused to budge on. They're effectively saying "come and sit down and talk about the 23 points of the contract that are in dispute - but we've already decided what the outcome is going to be for 22 of those points" (that's obviously paraphrased and simplified, but it is true that they weren't prepared to negotiate over 22 out of 23 points). It's not really possible to hold a negotiation with someone who point blank refuses to even consider compromising. We've also been 'taking action outside of work' for years; Save Our NHS campaigns have been holding demos and rallies and marches, petitioning and lobbying and using whatever recourse they can to get this sorted out. More recently, there have been mass demonstrations across the country, including one made up of 20,000 people in London. I've personally been working round the clock at times doing graphic design work for the Yorkshire and London campaigns, so I know exactly how hard the organisers and participants are working in their own free time to get this sorted.

You are thoroughly mistaken in believing they've been offered an 11% pay rise - or indeed, any kind of pay rise; that was simply some clever government spin. The changes to antisocial hours pay proposed by the government means that junior doctors would have been looking at a 20-40% pay cut before this 11% was mentioned. Jeremy Hunt then decides to offer an 11% pay rise on basic pay only, which doesn't come close to covering the shortfall left after antisocial hours have been redefined. It's like me stealing £20 from you, giving you £11 back and then saying "look everyone, I just gave her £11 - I don't know what she's complaining about!" Doctors aren't (and have not been at any point in these negotiations) asking for a pay rise, despite the fact that pay has been frozen for a good while now; they're simply asking not to have a pay cut.

Elective surgeries will still happen; they're not cancelled altogether. They just won't happen on those days. We're talking about routine ops here - things that don't need to be done on that very day. No-one wants to make patients wait a little bit longer. But when the only other option seems to be to take things lying down, something has to be done.

Of course this is partly about the money; it would be disingenuous to suggest otherwise. No-one in their right mind wants to take a pay cut for the privilege of working more antisocial hours. But what most of us are significantly more worried about is the implications of the new contract on patient safety. The new contract threatens to take away the safeguards that prevent hospitals forcing their doctors to work too many antisocial hours, and too many shifts back-to-back. Tired doctors make mistakes.. this won't just impact on us, it will impact on you, too. And we don't want that to happen. We don't want to see the NHS privatised (if this really were all about the money, that's exactly what we would want, because we'd earn rather a lot more under a private system) because we love it, and we know that patients - especially the poorest, most vulnerable patients - will get a worse deal if that's the way things go.

Take action outside of work? Enter in negotiations? Accept the fact that wages will rise slowly? (They've been given an 11% pay rise for crying out loud!)

Thanks, that was a great explanation! Do you think the rumour/opinion that the govt wants the NHS to collapse so it can become privatised is true?

Excellent argument!

You're welcome! And yes, I do think it's true. I don't think that there's some kind of Bond-esque villain sat behind a desk stroking a fluffy white cat and cackling maniacally or anything.. but Jeremy Hunt wrote a book about dismantling the NHS, for goodness' sake. Not only that but he and other prominent tories have substantial financial links to private healthcare firms, whether through receiving private donations or holding shares in those companies. Even with my most generous hat on, it's hard not to construe that as a conflict of interests.


Thanks.