The government is taking a “dangerous step” in confronting junior doctors at a time when the NHS faces “existential challenges” over its funding and the long-term care of elderly people, the former health minister Norman Lamb has said.
As the British Medical Association (BMA) hit back at Jeremy Hunt for warning that patients would be put at risk when junior doctors embark on their first industrial action since 1975, Lamb called on ministers to rebuild trust with medical staff.
Junior doctors in England will provide only emergency cover for 24 hours from 8am on Tuesday, significantly reducing operational resources. They will stage the same withdrawal of labour for 48 hours from 8am on 26 January and then stage one all-out strike between 8am and 5pm on Wednesday 10 February.
In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, Hunt said: “The withdrawal of elective care for the first two strike periods will be something that causes enormous frustration to patients who have their operations cancelled. Indeed, there will be people who need to have an operation for cancer – it will be difficult to guarantee that every patient will be kept safe.”
The BMA threw the health secretary’s language back at him by saying that he posed the greatest threat to patients.
A spokeperson said: “No doctor takes industrial action lightly and we regret the disruption it will case. However, junior doctors now feel that they have no option. The biggest threat to patient care is the government’s insistence on removing safeguards which prevent junior doctors from being forced to work dangerously long hours without breaks, with patients facing the prospect of being treated by exhausted doctors.”
Hunt attacked what he said were hardline factions within the BMA. “There is a tradition inside the BMA of taking very extreme positions against the health secretary of the day,” he said. “Nye Bevan, the founder of the NHS, was described as the medical führer by the BMA only three years after the second world war. But patients must always come before politics.
“Of course it’s a concern if some elements within the BMA are seeing this as a political opportunity to bash a Tory government that they hate. I am sure the vast majority of doctors are not in that place.”
The BMA spokesperson retorted: “The BMA is an apolitical organisation. The call for industrial action was made by junior doctors themselves, with 98% voting in favour of taking action, demonstrating the strength of feeling among the profession against government proposals that are unsafe and unfair.”
Lamb, who served under Hunt at the Department of Health for three years as Liberal Democrat social care minister, was highly critical of his former boss and the Conservative government. He told the Murnaghan programme on Sky News: “I just think it is a dangerous step that they are taking, taking on the doctors over a dispute that I think ultimately won’t achieve much of an objective in itself so I think the government just needs to settle this, move on and rebuild trust.
“The government is taking away safeguards against excessive working hours and actually reducing the pay of junior doctors who do work long hours … They haven’t got this right and, in a way, it is another symptom of the overall existential challenge that the NHS faces and we’ve got to get to grips with this. The longer we leave it, we will just sleep walk into a disaster and that’s my real concern.”
Hunt said the government was going through the “exhaustive process” of contacting every A&E department in the country to establish whether they would have enough staff to stay open on Tuesday.
Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer for England, told the Sunday Times she had sympathy with junior doctors but wanted them to call off the strike. “Industrial action will lead to patients suffering, and no doctor wants to see that happen,” she said.
The areas of disagreement include: plans by Hunt to scrap the system of automatic annual pay rises for junior doctors; hospitals forcing them to work dangerously long hours; and the demarcation of the periods of the week for which they receive only basic pay for working as opposed to overtime.
