Junior Doctors’ Contracts

Debate between Heidi Alexander and Lucy Frazer

Wednesday 28th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Heidi Alexander]

I will not give way, as I am going to make some progress.

Junior doctors are not just the first-year trainees fresh out of medical school. They are also the senior house officers and registrars with 12 or 15 years of experience. Junior doctors account for almost half of all doctors in hospitals and the vast majority already work nights and weekends. The responsibilities they carry are huge. Take the junior paediatric doctor working in accident and emergency who emailed me last week. Some of the things she does, I could never ever do. In her email, she said:

“I am in charge of teams resuscitating dying children regularly. I have had to make the decision to stop resuscitating a dying child. I have had to tell parents that their child is going to die. I have been the only doctor trying to stick a tiny breathing tube into a baby born 16 weeks early and weighing 600g at 3 in the morning.”

How is it right that she should face the prospect of being paid less? She is not asking to be paid more. She is just asking to be paid the same and to keep the safeguards that prevent her from being stretched even further.

[Lucy Frazer (South East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I do not think that any of us dispute the fantastic work that doctors do day in, day out, but we need to debate the motion that the hon. Lady has proposed. She said there were three points that she wants to put to the Secretary of State, but she failed to mention the one in the last line of the motion, which is that she wants proposals to be put forward that are “safe for patients”. Given that there was an article just last month on 5 September in the BMJ, put together by seven experts, including three professionals, that said that there was a clear association between weekend admission and worse outcomes for patients—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. I am sorry, but hon. Members should know that interventions should be short. You cannot make a speech in an intervention, and that should be a lesson for us all. Many Members want to speak and I want to get everybody in.