Spare us the piety over patient safety

ADDING insult to the injury caused by yesterday’s strike, militant members of the doctors’ union ask us to believe their protest has nothing to do with politics and precious little to do with money.

No, they maintain, their overriding concern is with the welfare of patients, whose safety they say will be jeopardised by the Government’s new contracts.

They should try telling that to the thousands whose long-awaited operations or appointments were cancelled, while many more face months of delays – some in acute pain – while the backlog clears.

If these strikes are not about politics, then why have members of the British Medical Association’s ruling council hailed it as a chance to attack the Tories and bring down ‘the whole edifice of austerity in the UK’?

Why, indeed, were they so ready to welcome to their picket lines Left-wing politicians such as shadow chancellor John McDonnell and Dennis Skinner?

As for money, BMA representatives talk about little else when they attack the supposed injustices of the new contracts. It’s only when they remember their official, pious line that they claim to be more worried about over-tired doctors making clinical mistakes.

But leave aside that Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is cutting, not increasing, the maximum hours junior doctors can be required to work, while offering to penalise hospitals that extend hours.

At stake is a far greater threat to patient safety. This is the shocking truth that those who have strokes at the weekend are 20 per cent more likely to die while the mortality rate for emergency surgery is 11 per cent higher, and 7 per cent higher for babies born at the weekend.

If the BMA genuinely put patients first, it would be moving heaven and earth to co- operate with Mr Hunt in reaching agreement on a 24-hour, seven-day NHS.

So the Mail salutes those courageous junior doctors who defied yesterday’s strike call. We urge others to follow their lead – before they drag their respected profession deeper into disrepute.