Junior Doctors’ Contracts

Debate between Emily Thornberry and Jeremy Hunt

Wednesday 28th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The fact is that this is a package designed to ensure that we eliminate the weekend effect, and it involves both junior doctors and consultants, because they both have their part to play.

[Emily Thornberry]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Mr Hunt]

I am going to make some progress before taking any further interventions.

The question for a Government and for a Health Secretary is this: when we are faced with this overwhelming evidence—six studies in five years—should we take action or ignore it? We are taking action. That is why in July I announced that we will be changing the contracts for both consultants and junior doctors as part of a package of measures to eliminate the weekend effect. If we believe in the NHS, and if we want it to be there for everyone, whatever their background or circumstances, we must be able to offer every NHS patient the promise of the same high-quality care, whichever day of the week they need it.

Let me set out for the House what I have proposed. We announced ambitious plans to roll out seven-day services across the country, with better weekend staffing across medical, diagnostic and support services in hospitals, as well as better integration with social care and seven-day GP access. That will reach a quarter of the population by March 2017, and the whole country by 2020. For consultants, we proposed an end to the right to opt out of weekend working, replacing it with a maximum obligation to work one weekend in four. To its credit, the BMA’s consultants committee has agreed to negotiate on that.

For junior doctors, we proposed to reduce the high overtime and weekend rates, which prevent hospitals from rostering enough staff at weekend, and increase basic pay to compensate. We have made a commitment that the pay bill as a whole would not be reduced, and today I can confirm that not a single junior doctor working within the legal limits for hours will have their pay cut, because this is about patient care, not saving money. Incidentally, I made it clear to the BMA at the beginning of September that that was a possible outcome of negotiations, in an attempt to encourage it to return to the negotiating table. Rather than negotiating, it chose to wind up its own members and create a huge amount of unnecessary anger.

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[Mr Hunt]

There is no reason whatsoever. What was strikingly absent from the shadow Health Secretary’s comments was an entreaty to the BMA asking it to come and negotiate. Labour Members can play a constructive role in this, but so far they have declined to do so.

[Emily Thornberry]

Is the right hon. Gentleman going to continue with his plan to change the rules so that trusts that insist on doctors working unsafe hours can no longer be fined for doing so? It will help if he can assure us that those rules will continue and trusts will be fined if they break them.

[Mr Hunt]

They are not fines; they are perverse incentives to doctors to work unsafe hours. We want to go one better than that. We propose to stop hospitals requiring doctors to work five nights in a row or six long days in a row, and to bring down the maximum number of hours that hospitals can ask a doctor to work in any one week. On top of that, we have imposed the toughest hospital regime of any country anywhere in the world that comes down very hard on hospitals that are not providing safe care.

NHS Reform

Debate between Emily Thornberry and Jeremy Hunt

Thursday 16th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

I thank my hon. Friend for his support for that Bill. I hope that plans that NHS England will announce shortly about how we can improve early cancer detection will give him much encouragement. He will see that some of the things that he is campaigning for are actually going to happen.

[Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)]

Everyone supports seven-day-a-week, 24-hour NHS care—who would not? But the bottom line is that there are insufficient resources and insufficient people at the moment for it to be possible to deliver those services. For the Secretary of State to try to blame the health unions for that is not fair, and there are people behind that. The tone of the statement that the Secretary of State made this morning at the King’s Fund has already caused alarm among GPs, and Maureen Baker, chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners, said that this announcement

“will sound…alarm bells for hardworking GPs who fear we will be next in line—even though we are already being pushed to our limits in trying to provide a safe five-day”

a week

“service for our patients.”

[Mr Hunt]

I do not blame doctors; I do not blame the unions. I blame Ministers from the hon. Lady’s Government who gave consultants an opt-out at weekends that has had a catastrophic impact on patient care. I am delighted that she supports seven-day care, but it was not in the Labour manifesto; it was in the Conservative manifesto, and we are putting in extra money—£5.5 billion more than Labour was promising—to ensure that we can pay for it.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Emily Thornberry and Jeremy Hunt

Tuesday 2nd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)]

The right hon. Gentleman talks about access to GPs. Will he wait a moment and think about Islington South, where this month we have three GP surgeries closing because our GPs have all resigned? Given the changes in the funding formula that this Government have overseen, will he meet a group of inner-London MPs to talk about our grave concerns about the change to funding and the lack of resources available to GPs?

[Mr Hunt]

I am happy to ensure that inner-London MPs have a meeting with the Minister to discuss those issues. The underfunding of general practice has been an historical problem, because we have had very strong hospital targets, which have tended to suck resources into the acute sector and away from out-of-hospital care. We want to put that right.

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[Mr Hunt]

I am very aware of the problems at Broomfield hospital. The Care Quality Commission has used its enforcement powers to impose an urgent condition on the trust. We will be following it closely, but we need to see urgent change there.

[Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)]

T8. I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for agreeing to meet me and some inner- London MPs to discuss the crisis of GPs in Islington and the surrounding area. In preparation for that meeting, will he look very carefully at the funding formula? It has changed, which means that resources have moved out of inner London to areas such as Bournemouth, where there are more older people. We need to look very carefully at that. Three surgeries have closed in Islington.

[Mr Hunt]

Of course we will look at the funding formula, but it needs to be fair to the whole country. The hon. Lady’s area is not the only one facing pressures in the GP system. Our ambition is to solve the problem everywhere.