Junior Doctors’ Contracts

Rupa Huq Excerpts

Wednesday 28th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

My constituent Dr Amy Di Marco, specialist registrar in general surgery, says that the term “junior doctors” is pretty misleading. She says

“in fact it applies to all those who are not GPs or Consultants and therefore includes many doctors who, like me, are nearing 40 (or over), with several years of experience and with responsibilities for patients as well as their own families.”

These are not work experience kids making the tea; they are serious professionals. They are highly qualified individuals who need commensurate remuneration and conditions that recognise that fact. In the areas of general practice, nuclear medicine, chemical pathology, emergency medicine, psychiatry, learning disabilities— the list goes on—we have a recruitment and retention crisis in any case, so these changes to contracts are not going to make the situation any better and risk exacerbating it. Junior doctors face the removal of the obligation on hospital trusts to safeguard the hours worked and the hiking up of plain time from 60 to 90 hours a week.

On 5 November there will be the ballot to strike. The BMA states that this is not a decision taken lightly. Indeed, being forced to work at weekends tending to patients on the brink of death after staying up all night cannot be good for anyone. There are also serious concerns that this proposal would disadvantage those on maternity pay or sick leave, employees working reduced hours or those doing research, yet this work pays dividends for the future and pioneering research on incurable diseases might save the NHS. All those people would be disadvantaged because their safeguards are being removed at a stroke.

This summer, we all saw the “#I’m in work, Jeremy” campaign on the promise for a seven-day NHS. It is happening already. I know this; I was born in Queen Charlotte’s hospital on a Sunday in 1972. Bolstered weekend care is obviously a good thing, but not if it means already stretched personnel being spread even more thinly, and not if it is unilaterally steamrollered through without adequate staffing and resources.

My constituent, Dr William Stern, neurology registrar— he has been in the Public Gallery since 4 o’clock—told me that he was not optimistic because of

“the current funding crisis…increasing deficits in most hospitals…targets being missed”

and junior doctors “threatening to strike”—something he does not want to do. I urge the Government to think again and end this stalemate. I urge all MPs to back the motion.