By Andrew Ford, member of Warrington South CLP
Interviews with junior doctors, Warrington Hospital.
Junior doctors are one section of the NHS workforce that is not going away. These energised young people are in no mood to tolerate what is actually surprisingly low pay and poor working conditions.
I was amazed to find the starting rate for junior doctors is just £14 an hour, which in no way reflects their depth of knowledge acquired over seven years of intense study, or the life-and-death responsibilities they face.
I spoke on this at a Unite all-members meeting and construction workers came up to me to say they were earning that rate years ago. The BMA is asking for £19 an hour, which most workers would accept as fair. Instead, the government and their stooge press denounce the junior doctors as greedy, for asking for a 35% pay rise. Well, 35% of not a lot is not a lot.
One of the doctors talked about working in A&E – “I like it. Someone comes in unconscious and you have to work out from the test results, X-rays, and their history, what is wrong and put it right. It’s hard; it’s pressurised, but also very rewarding.”
This is a situation that most people would find terrifying, but they find stimulating and worthwhile!
“Covid changed everything”
Another told me about the effect of cuts and austerity, “The waiting times were building even before Covid. Covid changed everything and the health service hasn’t really recovered. Covid had its effect, but the state of things is not just down to that”.
And most English hospitals have about a fifth of their beds occupied by people who do not need medical attention but are too frail to care for themselves. However, they cannot be discharged because there are so few cottage hospitals now and the councils are not being resourced to provide the care packages needed.
The outcome, of course, is massive backlogging of the hospitals – which makes the doctors’ work so much more difficult, waiting for beds and juggling queues.
The doctors I spoke to also talked about nights where four doctors are responsible for 400 patients. If one is on holiday and someone else is sick, that means just two doctors for 400 patients. If one patient then does have a heart attack or a medical emergency, that’s just one doctor for 399 patients.
They can also have a lot of trouble getting time off. One young doctor was forced to break his honeymoon and fly back to cover weekend nights. The doctors’ contract does say they should get time off for “life changing events” but in this case the honeymoon was not accepted as such.
Doctors tempted to move to far better conditions abroad
A doctor will often qualify with £90,000 or £100,000 of student debt after all those years at medical school. Then the pay is insufficient to repay the debt, or sometimes to even keep up with the interest.
Most of the junior doctors get daily adverts and contacts on Facebook and Instagram to leave the UK and move to Australia, New Zealand or Canada. There they could double their money, pay off their debt AND work in a system with no backlogs and enough beds in the system.
Working in A&E in Australia is much more rewarding because they have enough beds on the wards to allow the doctors to send people to a surgical, orthopaedic or medical ward, or to discharge them back home or into the community.
Despite the difficulties of moving thousands of miles from friends and family, of course it’s a tempting offer for bright, qualified young people. In fact, on a return visit to the picket, one of the doctors had done just that. She had taken a job in Australia. These people do not have to stay here.
The situation facing junior doctors in Tory Britain is clearly unsustainable. They train essentially at their own expense, only to graduate into a difficult working environment where they are treated with little respect by management, more like workhorses. All that, only to earn barely the average wage.
- Pay the doctors!
- Abolish tuition fees and student debts!
- Set up a national care service to look after our old people properly and free up the hospitals for medical care!
