FOLLOWING Saturday’s brilliant march on Downing Street by more than 7,000 junior doctors (see pages 6 & 7), and ahead of Wednesday’s 24-hour strike, Tory Health Secretary Hunt rounded on their union, the BMA, yesterday morning.
Blaming the BMA for junior doctors’ anger, Hunt repeated Tory claims that the new contract he has threatened to impose does not cut pay or lengthen working hours.
BMA junior doctor committee chairman Dr Johann Malawana responded: ‘The BMA has been clear throughout this process that we want to reach a negotiated agreement – no doctor wants to take industrial action, and our door has always been open to talks. But the government is putting politics before reason, and their continued threat to impose a contract that junior doctors have roundly rejected leaves us with no option.
‘Junior doctors already work around the clock, seven days a week, and they do so under their existing contract. If the government wants more seven-day services then, quite simply, they need more doctors, nurses and diagnostic staff, and the extra investment needed to deliver it.
‘Rather than addressing these issues, Jeremy Hunt is instead ploughing ahead with proposals that are unfair and could see many junior doctors voting with their feet. We already have a situation where unprecedented numbers of junior doctors are considering their options and even leaving the NHS, how can the government deliver more seven-day services if there are even greater staff shortages in the NHS?
‘The Health Secretary is also still refusing to acknowledge that he has scared patients and the public, and angered NHS staff by misrepresenting statistics. This action is wholly avoidable but Jeremy Hunt’s shambolic mishandling of this situation means he risks alienating a generation of junior doctors and undermining the delivery of future patient care, which is why 98% of those junior doctors who voted, supported taking industrial action.’
Shadow health secretary Heidi Alexander said: ‘This is a group of people who are incredibly intelligent, are able to make their own minds up, have read the proposals for themselves and have followed the negotiations very carefully. I think the way that Jeremy Hunt has handled these negotiations has been an utter shambles to be quite honest.’
Asked by the BBC’s Andrew Marr about anger among junior doctors, Hunt claimed: ‘One of the reasons for that anger is that they were told by the BMA that their pay was going to be cut – it isn’t. They were told that they were going to be asked to work longer hours – they aren’t. We are actually bringing down the hours that they work,’ he ludicrously continued.
Hunt accused the BMA of ‘spreading misinformation,’ adding: ‘As you know very well we have a free press and often my words are distorted by the BMA, which is one of the cleverest trade unions in the book, because they know that in any argument between doctors and politicians the public are going to side with the doctors.’
