NHS CONSULTANTS in England today begin two more days of industrial action, and have announced further strike dates in October, demonstrating their commitment to ensuring the Government acts to ‘fix consultant pay’ in order to retain the NHS’s most experienced clinicians.
This week’s strikes start at 7am today and end at 7am on Saturday, and consultants are also set to take more strike action on 19th and 20th September. In the absence of any progress in discussions with Government, they will now also strike on 2nd, 3rd and 4th October – the longest period of action by consultants so far.
Dr Vishal Sharma, BMA consultants committee chair, said: ‘No consultant wants to be striking so we head out to picket lines today with heavy hearts. We would much rather be inside the hospital seeing our patients. But we cannot sit by and watch passively as we are persistently devalued, undermined and forced to watch colleagues leave – much to the detriment of the NHS and patients.’
He added: ‘By refusing to talk to us – and it’s now been 150 days since the Health Secretary met with us – it just shows that the Government is not serious about the NHS, its workforce or patients.
‘Our message to the Prime Minister is that we are serious about protecting the consultant workforce and thereby the NHS and patients. We are striking today, and will do so again in September and October, but the Prime Minister has the power to avert any action at all, by getting around the table and presenting us with a credible offer.’
The consultants are now in the front-line of the struggle to defend the NHS from being bankrupted and privatised at the hands of the current Tory regime.
They stated yesterday that ‘Consultants are clear that they’re prepared to take regular action and politicians must be left in no doubt that our dispute will not go away simply because they refuse to negotiate. We will not be ignored.’
There is no doubt that the BMA Consultants Committee are now leading the fight against the Tory governments current offensive to close down the NHS and privatise its remnants.
After the series of murders carried out by Lucy Letby a bereaved family has accused the hospital management of a ‘total fob off’ when they pleaded for answers as they tried to repeatedly meet with the hospital’s medical director but their calls went unanswered.
Richard Scorer a solicitor at the Slayter and Gordon law firm which represents the family said it was shameful that the medical director, Ian Harvey, has failed to properly respond to the parents’ concerns.
Scorer told the bourgeois media that ‘It seems that Ian Harvey had little interest in passing any meaningful information to the parents, responding properly to their concerns, or comply with any duty of candour to them.’
He added: ‘In our view this failure to address parental concerns was shameful and another matter which needs to be investigated by a statutory inquiry with the power to compel witnesses and the production of documents.’
Harvey retired as medical director weeks after Letby’s arrest in July 2018 and now lives in the south of France. In fact senior doctors first alerted an executive to the nurses connection to three unexplained sudden deaths in June 2015 – a year before she was finally removed from the neo natal unit.
Not only that, but doctors that pointed out the nurse’s connection to hospital deaths were criticised by the management and were urged to apologise to the murderess. The problem was not that just nobody was listening but that the NHS management has been focussed on privatising the NHS as their most important duty and were no doubt assured that they could rule out any problem in the race to the bottom.
Now Hospital Consultants in England have shown where they stand with their strike actions to defend and save the NHS from privatisation and closures.
The TUC Congress is meeting from Monday 11th September and will constitute the most powerful workers assembly in decades.
The mass of delegates are 100% in support of the refusal of Hospital Consultants to allow the NHS to be junked by the Tory government.
The TUC must join the action, that is being called by the doctors and call a general strike to support and defend the NHS from privatisation, by bringing down the Tories and bringing in a Workers Government and Socialism. This is the only way forward!
