Jeremy Hunt-v-Junior Doctors.

[El Presidente]

Exactly,... the "Save our NHS" theme they are throwing about, is simply misleading, and political.

Perhaps you are right, and the 98% of Junior Doctors who voted for the strike are a red menace who cannot be trusted. They are, in the words of the Iron Lady herself, "The Enemy Within".

 

[Herr Tubthumper]

True, but it's ring fenced, at a higher level and only those paying in get something out. German health stuff is tax deductible as well.

I have just looked up the rate for German state health and its 15%, half paid by the employer. This is much higher than UK NI, which covers many things and not just health, isn't it?

 

[El Presidente]

This is an idealogically engineered dispute by governement that is hell bent on dismantling one of this country's greatest assets so it's buddies in the private health sector can clean up and profit at the expense of those in need of care.

That's an outrageous slur on the integrity of Jeremy Hunt. Just because he co-wrote a paper calling for the abolition of the NHS a few years ago it doesn't automatically mean that he is trying to engineer his beliefs through the back door.

I bet you were one of those sandal wearing tofu eaters who put two and two together to get five when he was texting James Murdoch about News Corporation's planned takeover of BSkyB in 2012 telling him that it was 'great' the EU had decided not to get involved. That in no way would have impacted upon Jezza's integrity when he. as cunture secretary, made the decision whether or not to approve the takeover.

 

[Seagull27]

That's an outrageous slur on the integrity of Jeremy Hunt. Just because he co-wrote a paper calling for the abolition of the NHS a few years ago it doesn't automatically mean that he is trying to engineer his beliefs through the back door.

I bet you were one of those sandal wearing tofu eaters who put two and two together to get five when he was texting James Murdoch about News Corporation's planned takeover of BSkyB in 2012 telling him that it was 'great' the EU had decided not to get involved. That in no way would have impacted upon Jezza's integrity when he. as cunture secretary, made the decision whether or not to approve the takeover.

Freudian slip?

 

[El Presidente]

Freudian slip?

Oops!

 

[glasfryn]

It's not about money. There isn't more money on the table, it's reshuffling the allocation of money and getting more hours done with the same amount of staff. Do you really want your life in the hands of someone who is at the end of a ridiculously long shift? The pay for unsocial hours is not optional on top of basic pay those hours are contracted and have to be served. These are doctors making life and death decisions and following a lifelong vocation not shoe shop assistants having to work at the weekends (no offence to any retail staff intended, I am just making a declamatory point).

Given the vital importance of the work they do doctors and other health service workers are vastly underpaid when compared to the pay of other professions.

This is an idealogically engineered dispute by governement that is hell bent on dismantling one of this country's greatest assets so it's buddies in the private health sector can clean up and profit at the expense of those in need of care.

trouble is some do not realise just how important that work they do until they/ or some close friend or relative are laying on a bed in a corridor in a life or death situation, and you might ask yourself this question where will they be when some bright spark says we have no JUNIOR DOCTOR they have all moved away or abroad where they get not only paid what they are worth but also a little respect from their managers.
a thought has also occured to me what would have happened to cameron when he run into A&E with his son in his arms and all the JUNIOR DOCTORS had moved on.
the shite would have hit the fans thats what

 

[heathgate]

trouble is some do not realise just how important that work they do until they/ or some close friend or relative are laying on a bed in a corridor in a life or death situation.

True,... the same can be applied to Firemen, Paramedics, Policemen, Soldiers etc etc......

 

[drew]

Therefore Brother Ernest,i do hope that should you ever require the services of the Nhs (and i hope that you don't) you are seen and treated by a Doctor and not Mr J Hunt.

I might be wrong but I think Ernest is on the side of the doctors.

 

[Guy Fawkes]

This is where the PR kicks in, whilst the 11% rise for the 'basic hours' on paper looks generous to the outside world, the definitiion of 'unsocial hours' for which the pay is higher has been changed, which will leave many doctors with a paycut as they no longer get that pay but still have the same number of hours. All the while Hunt keeps calling for a 7 day service (which already exists, doctors already work weekends) he will not provide the extra staff to make this happen in the way he is spinning it to the public.

Do you know any doctors or medical staff? They work extremely hard in the most stressful of circumstances with people's lives literally in their hands. They know it's going to be a tough and arduous career, but they take it up because they care about people. A quality definitely lacking in this squalid excuse of a government. Double their pay and it still wouldn't be enough, they deserve it. I'd rather my tax money was spent there rather than wasting it on expensive trinkets such as Trident, subsidising poverty the wages of multinational corporations or letting their business chums off the tax hook so Gideon can get a free trip to the Superbowl.

why would the Government provide extra staff? - surely it's up to the hospital and the NHS trust managers to determine how many staff are employed and what shifts they cove

A doctor can't just walk out if it is the end of his shift if there is nobody there to relieve him or he is in the middle of saving someone's life, people forget this

Does this change if you go from a banded paid doctor to one that is paid via the Governments proposed wage structure?

Fair enough, It was how your post came across. My mistake.

Basically where I am at on this is do I think healthcare should be 7days a week. Yes

Should Doctors be working 60 hours a week, No. To me this seems bordering on dangerous that in this particular profession you have to be mentally fresh as long as possible so laziness and mistakes are not made.

Why should existing junior doctors have to work those extra hours? why can't extra staff be recruited to cover the additional 2 hours

4 staff at 60 hours = 5 staff at 48 hours = same staff costs + less stress and tiredness on each doctor and potentially the possibility of less mistakes and safer patient care

 

[Guy Fawkes]

I agree with you in the main, but money is not used wisely in the NHS. I know several people that work for the NHS ranging from physios, medical secretaries to IT. The management of the money is very poor, so putting more money in, is not the solution, at the moment. The whole structure is creaking, as it is expected to do more than it was ever designed to do.

Very good post. One of the major achievements of the Labour years was an increase in health spending to European averages. This enabled big increases in the pay of NHS employees. That is now being reversed as we spend less and less than our European counterparts. By 2020 public expenditure will be at historic low levels as a proportion of GDP. Do people realise I wonder that that is what they voted for?

Surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet

http://www.theguardian.com/society/...n-a-year-by-cutting-running-costs-say-reports

(report carried out by a Labour peer Lord Carter of Coles on behalf of the Government)

The NHS is wasting billions of pounds a year through inefficient use of staff, paying over the odds for supplies, “bedblocking” and undue reliance on agency workers, two official reports warn on Friday.

Around 8,500 “bedblocking” patients are stuck in NHS hospitals every day – costing the health service £900m a year and driving up use of the private sector.

An inquiry ordered by health secretary Jeremy Hunt into NHS productivity and use of its resources has found that hospitals in England could save £5bn a year of their £55bn budget by 2020 using measures such as cutting their running costs and reducing unacceptable variations in the quality of care that patients experience.

It's all well and good pumping more and more money into something, but what's far more important is how that extra money is used - save a percentage of the amount in this report and it can be re-directed towards funding extra staff on weekends rather than just forcing existing staff to work longer

 

[Guy Fawkes]

£45k is the starting salary for a graduate working in Canary Wharf for an investment bank. By the time they are 27 they would add at least £100k to that, and they have contributed NOTHING to society, unlike medical professionals, who save lives.

Nothing? - not even tax on wages / earnings which is collected by the Government to pay for public services?

or by helping to generate profits for their businesses, what about the corporation taxes which also gets collected and spent by the Government?

Or their spending (of their own wages) in the economy which helps keep other people employed and so on.......

 

[Guy Fawkes]

Between 2011 and 2015, Germany spent 11.3% of GDP on health whereas over the same period we spent 9.1%

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS

How do Germans fair in other comparable aspects, such as:
- do they have more spare capital to spend as they wish
- is their overall taxation higher or lower than here?
- is the average personal debt burden higher or lower
- and how does the overall cost of living compare to here (both directly and when measured against average earnings too?) [MENTION=409]Herr Tubthumper[/MENTION]
(I mean if you pay less tax, have less to repay in personal debt and therefore have more spare cash to spend as you wish, it makes it easier to be able to pay more for healthcare and do we have the same flexibility here or are things much tighter for a lot of our population and an increase in tax could / would have a massive effect on peoples lives? )

 

[El Presidente]

Nothing? - not even tax on wages / earnings which is collected by the Government to pay for public services?

or by helping to generate profits for their businesses, what about the corporation taxes which also gets collected and spent by the Government?

Or their spending (of their own wages) in the economy which helps keep other people employed and so on.......

If you balance that against the mayhem and destruction they have caused in the last decade through mis-selling, interest rate rigging, derivative shorting, the jobs lost through the hair brained M&A deals they recomment, PFI adding to public debt and to top it all the 2008 global economic crisis due to manipulation of toxic debt and the whole subprime fraud, I would say that their contribution was less than zero overall.

 

[Leekbrookgull]

Junior Doctors 1 Mr Hunt 0

 

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

If nothing else Hunt will have improved the future pool of junior doctors working in Wales, Scotland, Australia, USA..........

I work at Tommy's. The junior doctors I know (which is, by definition, anyone not a consultant with a licence to print their own money doing private practice) are being wooed by the Aussies. Botany Bay won't know what's hit it, the way things are going . . . .

 

[Guy Fawkes]

If you balance that against the mayhem and destruction they have caused in the last decade through mis-selling, interest rate rigging, derivative shorting, the jobs lost through the hair brained M&A deals they recomment, PFI adding to public debt and to top it all the 2008 global economic crisis due to manipulation of toxic debt and the whole subprime fraud, I would say that their contribution was less than zero overall.

Massive generalisation, like saying all teachers are good or bad at their job etc....

Things like PFI deals are only as good as the person from the public body arranging them / agreeing to them. There is a danger that someone agrees a deal which isn't good value for money to the public (like the new airport built in Scotland by PFI (when Labour were in power) where it cost several times more than it should and they gave away the rights to collect an income from the commercial space to the financiers too) it comes down to how much the individual cares about getting the very best deal that can and treating public money as something they need to be very frugal when spending, or if they think oh well it's not my cash and it makes no difference to me how much we end up paying (a lot of budgets exist and if not used, are lost so why get maximum value for money throughout the year only to have an excess that you have to spend on stuff you don't really want because you won't get the same budget the following year)

Like in all walks of life, and both private and public areas, there will be good and bad examples and it can / will vary dramatically as it relies on people

 

[Guy Fawkes]

I work at Tommy's. The junior doctors I know (which is, by definition, anyone not a consultant with a licence to print their own money doing private practice) are being wooed by the Aussies. Botany Bay won't know what's hit it, the way things are going . . . .

Maybe how doctors are classified needs to be looked at? ie, Junior doctor is pretty much anything upto but not including a consultant and it also ranges from just out of medical school to someone with years of experience and also covers a wide variety of duties - Maybe the rates of pay can then also reflect their roles more closely too and reward experience and specialists better?

 

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

Maybe how doctors are classified needs to be looked at? ie, Junior doctor is pretty much anything upto but not including a consultant and it also ranges from just out of medical school to someone with years of experience and also covers a wide variety of duties - Maybe the rates of pay can then also reflect their roles more closely too and reward experience and specialists better?

The media use the term 'junior doctors' as I described it, but in reality there are lots of grades, and lots of different pay and conditions. The issue here (as I am sure has been stated) is that Hunt wants to treat Saturday as a normal week day for the massed ranks (in terms of pay rate) in return for an across the board increase in pay rate. Medics up in arms. Understandably so (change of terms and conditions for a weak bargain). When the dust settles, Hunt will be left looking what he is . . . . a chancer.

 

[Creaky]

What I really don't understand is that nurses work 24/7. There is no difference in staffing or shift patterns at any time during the week. Their pay does change depending on the hours they work but apart from that it is a fully staffed job all the time.

Doctors don't. It's a 5 day week with weekends on call. I just don't understand this.

If medical procedures, operations and out-patient appointments are suspended or reduced over the weekend, (which is what JH is saying shouldn't happen), then the number of nurses and other support staff on duty over the weekend must surely also be reduced

 

[Guy Fawkes]

The media use the term 'junior doctors' as I described it, but in reality there are lots of grades, and lots of different pay and conditions. The issue here (as I am sure has been stated) is that Hunt wants to treat Saturday as a normal week day for the massed ranks (in terms of pay rate) in return for an across the board increase in pay rate. Medics up in arms. Understandably so (change of terms and conditions for a weak bargain). When the dust settles, Hunt will be left looking what he is . . . . a chancer.

I can kinda see why he does though, illness and disease, etc don't stop for Sundays so should treatment be reduced or cost more to administer due to an old fashioned idea of Sunday being a religious day / day of rest. if the doctors are being compensated (indirectly in terms of getting the extra for a Sunday shift but it being paid in a way it's spread out over all the hours that Doctor works in a week)

Shops open on Sundays and it wouldn't surprise me if we eventually head towards opening hours mirroring the rest of the week rather than being stopped by Sunday trading laws (the country is becoming less religious) And i would imagine shops will end up paying at just the standard hourly rate that applies the rest of the week (I think Woolworths did this just before they went bust for new employees but i could be wrong)

Its a sign of society changing, whether it's something that's right for the NHS to adopt (at least now and not in the distant future if it becomes the norm in all walks of life) i don't know