Save the NHS!

And anyone else that has an appointment on one of the strike days...
Still, what else can they do? Hopefully Hunt will see sense and bin the whole thing, but I suspect bigger forces are at work here. It's all part of the road to privatisation IMO.
 
Uther said:
And anyone else that has an appointment on one of the strike days...
Still, what else can they do? Hopefully Hunt will see sense and bin the whole thing, but I suspect bigger forces are at work here. It's all part of the road to privatisation IMO.
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That's clear as day. So many private contracts being handed out at the moment.
 
Fully in support of the doctors here, and glad to see such a positive turnout.

Being a junior doctor is not like another job. Doctors WANT to work for the NHS despite higher wages offered elsewhere, but not at the expense of safety. The government doesn't seem to appreciate they have a very dedicated workforce that puts up with a lot of nonsense and routinely goes above and beyond their job description to care for patients.
 
A lot of big numbers have been published recently regarding the NHS. On course for a 2.2bn deficit this year although if at 1.6bn after 6 months perhaps this could be much higher. 55,000 junior doctors which cost 3.1bn per year. 900mn extra(!) spent on agency staff in first 6 months, totalling 1.8bn spent on agency staff in the same period so on for 3.6bn for the year. 270mn in the first 6 months caused by an inability to discharge patients who require social care so on for 540mn this year, possibly less if El-Nino is decent (fingers crossed!). Health and social care of course is in crisis due to budget cuts to local councils and headlines this morning talk about a 2% rise in council tax to help but this is on a backdrop of 40-60% of care providers facing bankruptcy. Also in the news today, the government is looking at taking away bursaries to train 60,000 student nurses per year which costs 825mn.

When I look at all these figures and trends I see false economies inside false economies. The overall strategy appears to be, cuts will save money with no appreciation of the long term consequences - or perhaps every appreciation of them. We live in a society with an ageing population, with increasing social care needs and yet social care budgets are being slashed, which leads to bed blocking and bed crises. The strategy by NHS England and the Department for Health seems to be anti-staff, which if something like the cut to student nurses goes through will only exacerbate an already critical shortage of nurses. The NHS has already spent an extra 900mn in 6 months on agency staff - many of them nurses - so in what world does it make sense to make it harder to become a nurse by cutting an annual budget of 825mn. And attacking junior doctors is just dumb, especially when the proposed change is supposed to be cost neutral. Junior doctors are going on strike for many reasons, the biggest of which is to oppose the proposal to remove financial penalties for extending their hours into unsafe realms.

Hunt wrote the book on privatising the NHS and is now implementing a self destruct strategy to fast-forward the consequences of Lansley's Health and Social Care Act 2012, which enables private companies to bid for lucrative health contracts, which then often get taken away from them due to incompetence and cost saving strategies that reduce minimum quality standards. In the meantime tax payers pay to bridge the private companies quality gap, pay for remaining NHS services that private companies don't want but which the NHS due to the loss of lucrative services can no longer redistribute money into, pay agencies to fill strategy driven staff shortages, pay to take care of patients that cuts to social care mean can no longer be discharged from hospital. All on a backdrop of an aging population with greater life expectancy, growing healthcare demands and a growing UK population. And this is just what is reported, which I suspect is the tip of the iceberg which we're sailing full steam towards in the dark with no radar and a ****ed lookout. RIP NHS.

"it will last as long as there folk left with the faith to fight for it." - Bevan

I'm a trainee anaesthetist (junior doctor) and if I play out the above and the NHS collapses with the private sector and health insurance picking up the pieces then what does that mean for me? There's no one else that's going to do my job - it's not a miners strike, there's no open cast mine in Australia of doctoring talent - and we'll simply move to a private healthcare system where my salary will more than double, instead of the 15% real-terms decrease we've seen since 2000. Junior doctors aren't striking because of pay, we're striking because the NHS is crumbling all around us and we enjoy working in a free at the point of use system that is the envy of other 1st world countries. Unfortunately, the damage may already have been done but at least this is an issue that we can win in order to wake people up to what's happening.
 
Dimple said:
Just a thought and having ties with both the UHNM and Keele Uni, I've always wondered why everybody else who goes to Uni is expected to pay for their education but Nurses etc don't expect to pay!
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Maybe the answer to why some have to pay for their education and others don't is to look at how education is funded and increase the number of courses considered essential/desirable to the country as a whole, and see that that they are fully-funded, instead of embarking on a race to the bottom where because one group has to take out a loan to fund their way through university, everybody should.

'Leveling the playing field' is on the face of it a noble ambition, until it emerges that the method of achieving that is to ensure everyone is in equally as bad a position.
 
dowie said:
frankly anyone who wants to train as a doctor, nurse, paramedic ought to be fully funded - with the provision that they work for the NHS for X years in return or else have to pay it back if they work privately, for an agency or move overseas
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This, 100%
 
tres said:
Yep, medical student
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Crappy situation to be in. You're invested in a job that you've no idea what it will entail when you finally get out of Uni heavily in debt.

You'll be working for a monopoly employer who has cut your pension and increased your contributions, frozen the sub-inflation pay increment and is trying to enforce increased hours, remove working hours protection and wants more weekend working without paying for it.

The next few weeks will be very interesting, I can't see Hunt having a career left at the end of it personally but we'll see.
 
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Minstadave said:
Crappy sitatuion to be in. You're invested in a job that you've no idea what it will entail when you finally get out of Uni heavily in debt.

You'll be working for a monopoly employer who has cut your pension and increased your contributions, frozen the sub-inflation pay increment and is trying to enforce increased hours, remove working hours protection and wants more weekend working without paying for it.

The next few weeks will be very interesting, I can't see Hunt having a career left at the end of it personally but we'll see.
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That's right, cheer him up...
 
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