THE BMA yesterday responded angrily to health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s ‘wholesale attack’ on doctors and the threat to impose seven-day working for consultants without extra payment for weekends.
Hunt had the gall to blame consultants for patients’ deaths, saying 15 per cent more patients died if they entered hospital at the weekend compared to Monday to Friday. Dr Mark Porter, BMA council chair, said: ‘Today’s announcement is nothing more than a wholesale attack on doctors to mask the fact that for two years the government has failed to outline any concrete proposals for introducing more seven-day hospital services.
‘The health secretary has questions to answer. How does he plan to pay for it? How will he ensure there isn’t a reduction in mid-week services or fewer doctors on wards Monday to Friday? Yet again there are no answers. More than 80 per cent of the public believe that doctors alone cannot deliver seven-day services without proper support, yet the health secretary makes no mention of the extra nurses, diagnostic staff, porters, admin staff – the list goes on – that would be needed to deliver the same high level standard of care patients deserve seven days a week.
‘Doctors believe patients should have access to the same quality of care, seven days a week. If the health secretary wants the same he should be working with us, not setting artificial deadlines and attacking the very people who are the leading advocates for patients, protecting and improving patient care in the face of unprecedented rising demand and funding deficits. This is a blatant attempt by the government to distract from its refusal to invest properly in emergency care.’
He asked: ‘If a consultant has been working all night operating, should they actually be required to work all the next day as well? ‘We’d like contractual terms to protect patients from overwork.’
Referring to negotiations with the government, he added: ‘One of the real problems we face is an overfocus, effectively blaming committed staff, who already work weekends to support sick patients as and when they need it, when it’s actually an entire system that doesn’t get enough investment.’
He stressed: ‘One of the problems all along is no detailed proposals in as to how seven-day services will work but simply focusing on the contract of employment. It’s not individual contracts that determine things here but how we invest in the system as a whole.’
He added: ‘It is not the case that consultants don’t engage in weekend working. We know that 90% of consultants in the NHS work weekends … we already do; I do it personally, so do most of my colleagues.’
