Junior Doctors Contracts Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department of Health and Social Care
Andrea Jenkyns
Main Page: Andrea Jenkyns (Conservative - Morley and Outwood)Department Debates - View all Andrea Jenkyns's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(8 years ago)
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Mr Hunt
I am very happy to do so. We are introducing a new contract from this August, and it will be for all junior doctors. It will go progressively through the different ranks of junior doctors and, over the course of the next year, the vast majority of new doctors will move on to the new contracts. The reason that we did not use the word “impose” in the original statement was not a matter of semantics. We are proceeding with this new contract and everyone will move on to it, which is the gist of what most people mean by this. What we are not doing is changing existing contracts, so when people move trust or move to a new position, they will move on to a new contract. That is why we have used the term “introduction” of new contracts. However, it would have been much better if the introduction of the new contracts had been done through a negotiated process. That is why we took such trouble: we went to 75 meetings and made 73 different concessions in order to try to do this on a negotiated basis. Very regrettably, that proved not to be possible, which is why we took the difficult decision to proceed with these new contracts anyway.
Andrea Jenkyns (Morley and Outwood) (Con)
Does the Secretary of State agree that it is totally unjustified for doctors to demand higher premium rates at weekends when almost all other NHS workers, and indeed most other working people across the economy, do not get them? It is completely disrespectful for the BMA to suggest that doctors’ lives are somehow uniquely disproportionately inconvenienced by Saturday shifts and that those of other people are not.
Mr Hunt
It is true that the BMA rejected Saturday premium pay that was more generous than the Saturday premium pay offered to nurses, healthcare assistants or paramedics working in the same hospitals and operating theatres as those doctors. Many people will ask whether that was a reasonable position to take, given that the doctors’ overall pay was protected. I think they will also ask whether, even if the doctors disagreed with the Government on that point, it was appropriate or proportionate for them to withdraw life-saving emergency care from patients in the pursuance of their disagreement. I wonder whether that is something that will shape many people’s confidence in what the NHS stands for.