No one will die if we hold all-out strike, says doctors’ union leader
no one will die if junior doctors withdraw all clinical care in next month’s unprecedented total strike, their union leader has claimed.
tens of thousands of junior doctors are planning to take part in the first ever full-walk out in the history of the nHS on February 10.
they caused major disruption by staging a 24-hour ‘emergency only’ strike – meaning they withdrew all but emergency care – on tuesday.
now they plan to intensify the action with a 48-hour strike in less than two weeks’ time, on January 26, followed by a total withdrawal of their services next month.
Junior doctors are being told by their union not to treat any patients at all, even those needing emergency A& e treatment, from 8am to 5pm on February 10 during what will be one of the busiest times of the week.
this morning representatives from the British medical Association will begin talks with the Government through the conciliation service AcAS. the row centres on proposed changes to junior doctors’ contracts that the union claims will see them doing more out of hours work for lower rates of pay. Department of Health officials are hopeful of reaching a deal before the next wave of strikes and yesterday claimed to have reached agreement on 15 out of 16 points. the BmA
‘Consultants will provide care’
denies this and says it remains at odds over a number of different clauses.
In order to prepare for the worst, nHS officials have already started ringing round hospital A&e units to establish whether they would have enough staff to stay open safely in the event of a total walk-out. Doctors have never completely deserted their patients before and in previous strikes in 2012, 1975 and on tuesday still treated emergencies.
But despite the apparent risk of a total walkout, Dr mark Porter, chair of the BmA’s council, yesterday repeatedly denied patients would die.
He said: ‘It’s not going to be a cessation of emergency care.
‘We’ll be calling on junior doctors to not take part in emergency care which is a very different thing to abandoning emergency care altogether.’
He claimed there would be plenty of other senior staff willing to step in while their more junior colleagues were on the picket lines. ‘consultants and senior doctors will still be in hospital and still working in emergency care,’ he told Radio 4’s today programme. ‘Yes, further industrial action will cause further disruption. For that I am truly sorry and so is any doctor who’s going to be involved in industrial action.
‘But other doctors will be providing emergency care in this country.’
He also claimed that hospitals faced pressures on a similar scale to strikes every day because they were so busy: ‘the nHS faces pressures similar to this every day. there are level 4 and black alerts up and down the country as we speak because of the pressure placed on the nHS, largely due to the inadequate resources.’
Figures suggest that at least 4,000 operations and 17,500 out-patient appointments were cancelled as a result of tuesday’s strike. But this number could increase by more than four-fold if the two other strikes go ahead with well over 100,000 patients affected.
chris Hopson, chief executive of nHS Providers, which represents hospital bosses, said: ‘the withdrawal of emergency care which has never happened before would significantly increase risk.’