CLEARLY the Tory government is determined NOT to address the drastic workforce and pay crisis in the NHS which is at the centre of the crumbling of essential NHS services and will see the NHS end up as a third class rump for the poor.
A proper long term workforce plan would treble medical student intake, with the aim to bring doctor to population ratios in England up to EU average levels and more.
Pay would be the central issue, not the embarassment it is at the moment, not even to be mentioned!
Meanwhile, thousands of excellent students apply each year for medical school and are turned away.
A proper plan would include restoring the 25,000 acute and general beds lost since 10/10/11.
In fact, medical student intake must be trebled, more medical schools should be urgently built. Tuition fees must be abolished.
The NHS has to guarantee every medical student a FY1 post at graduation.
The drive to impose cheaper doctor substitutes like physicians, associates and nursing assistants for nurses and apprentices, must be stopped at once.
Those young people or older people who are keen to learn must be given the chance to be fully trained doctors and nurses if they want to, at a proper rate of pay.
There has to be an end to the plethora of cheaper half trained staff as substitutes for properly trained staff.
£2.4bn over five years is a pittance and certainly not enough for a massive expansion of doctor training.
It is wrong to say that this is the first long term NHS workforce plan.
The first was in 1948, when the NHS was first founded and the doctors were put in charge, and a system of national and regional planning for the different specialties was set up.
There must be public health specialties and planned services according to population demographics and patient needs.
The current situation is that the Integrated Care Systems set up in the Health and Social Care Act 2022, put the interests of corporate business first, prioritise cheapness, and productivity savings over the care of patients.
Health Secretary Barclay glorified the diagnostic and community hubs and separate surgical hubs for elective care, which are public private partnerships, designed to strip elective care out of proper NHS hospitals, and the sort of cases on which junior doctors are trained.
It is clear that this government has to go and NHS staff must continue their battle for full pay restoration and more staff.
The ‘workforce plan’ is a joke. The royal colleges are colluding with the Tories.
There’s thousands of juniors who cannot progress to enter higher specialist training, yet the colleges are promoting the training of non-medically qualified associates, despite there being mass shortages of consultants. This is being duplicated across many specialties.
For the first time (ever) it’s dawning on junior doctors that corporate interests determine health policy.
More staff will be taken on, but there are not any details about their pay.
Thousands of new roles are to be created to work alongside them, as part of a major NHS England workforce plan.
However, there are no details about their pay either. It is to be an even cheaper labour NHS.
University places for medical students will double, a new apprenticeship scheme for doctors is planned and medical degrees could be shortened.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak yesterday called the delayed workforce plan ‘historic’ and had taken time to get right.
However, low pay and poor working conditions will be the rule in the new NHS.
There are more than 110,000 vacancies in the workforce at present, with one out of every 10 posts unfilled, which creates huge pressure on staff and affects the care patients receive.
Very low NHS pay has led to this year’s strikes. The NHS has been beset by strikes this year, and the dispute with junior and senior doctors is still continuing.
Pay for staff does not feature in the plan – instead, it focuses on increasing training places for medical and nursing students and a new scheme that allows trainee doctors to earn while they learn, having two or more jobs.
A consultation to prepare the way for five-year medical degrees to be shortened by a year is also to be launched.
It is to be an NHS on the cheap, with workers having more than one job, and with degree courses shortened by at least a year.
Unveiling full details of the 15-year plan yesterday at Downing Street, PM Sunak said it would ‘deliver the biggest ever expansion in the number of doctors and nurses that we train, and a plan to reform the NHS so we deliver better care in a changing world’.
Even Sunak had to admit that overcoming the challenges of an overstretched workforce ‘won’t be quick or easy’.
NHS England chief executive Amanda Pritchard said the plan gave ‘a once-in-a-generation opportunity to put staffing on a sustainable footing for years’. This is a sick joke. Poverty wages are not the key to a first class health service.
Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting said yesterday that Tory ministers had ‘nicked’ the opposition’s plan and criticised the delay in publishing it.
The Liberal Democrats said the plan had come ‘too late’ for the millions of people who had suffered in pain or died in hospital corridors waiting for treatment.
The truth is that saving the NHS means getting the Tories out and getting in a real workers’ government.
