Hunt interview
The Health Secretary says the BMA is guilty of misinformation as he makes a last-ditch attempt to stop junior doctors striking
Jeremy Hunt has become accustomed to “brickbats” over the years from the British Medical Association.
However, in the run-up to the unprecedented strike by junior doctors on Tuesday, the levels of vitriol have reached new heights.
Last week it emerged that a leading figure behind the scenes at the BMA had likened Conservative policies to Nazi propaganda, and was one of several Labour supporters on the union’s council.
Doctors’ leaders have also been accused by the NHS of acting illegally by urging activists from other unions to turn out in support of their strike next week. In an interview with The Sunday
Telegraph, Mr Hunt warned that “some elements” of the BMA appeared to be putting their desire to settle scores with the Government ahead of the well-being of their patients.
“There is a tradition inside the BMA of taking very extreme positions against the Health Secretary of the day,” he said.
“Nye Bevan, the founder of the NHS, was described as the medical Führer by the BMA only three years after the Second World War.
“So to a certain extent you take some of the brickbats with a pinch of salt. That’s part of the cut and thrust of the political world.
“But patients must always come before politics. Whatever the political heat of the moment, whatever the anger in the end, patients have to come first.
“Of course it’s a concern if some elements within the BMA are seeing this as a political opportunity to bash a Tory government that they hate. I am sure the vast majority of doctors are not in that place.
“I think it’s really important that the BMA leadership rein in any elements who are looking at this strike in that way because that would be the worst possible thing for the NHS.”
On Tuesday, the BMA will embark on the first of three spells of industrial action in a dispute over junior doctors’ contracts. Thousands of junior doctors will withdraw all but emergency care for 24 hours, leading to the cancellation of thousands of operations. In the third strike, in February, they will withdraw emergency care, too.
For Mr Hunt, the timing of the strikes is especially concerning. They are taking place at one of the busiest times of the year for the NHS and the Health Secretary’s warning is stark: patients’ lives will be put at risk.
“The withdrawal of elective care for the first two strike periods will be something that causes enormous frustration to patients who have their operations cancelled,” he said.
“Indeed, there will be people who need to have an operation for cancer – it will be difficult to guarantee that every patient will be kept safe.”
It is the third strike that most concerns Mr Hunt, however, because it will see the withdrawal of emergency care.
He revealed that the Department of Health was going through the “exhaustive process” of contacting every accident and emergency department in the country to establish which may be forced to close.
He said: “It is unprecedented for doctors to say that they will be withdrawing emergency care. That is basically saying that you won’t be there for your patients even in lifethreatening situations.
“We are now going through an exhaustive process with every hospital in the country to try to understand which might struggle to keep their A&E departments open if junior doctors withdraw their labour. It is a very serious matter for patients.
“We will do everything we can to keep every A&E department open but junior doctors are the backbone of our A&E departments and that will depend on finding consultants who can step in. That is a huge logistical exercise, which is now under way.
“Frankly it is the busiest time of the year for hospitals right now.
“The last thing I want to be doing is diverting precious management resources into trying to assess how they will keep their patients safe if junior doctors don’t turn up for work. It is a very, very serious thing.”
At the heart of Mr Hunt’s confrontation with the BMA lie the Government’s plans for a seven-day NHS. The plans, one of the centrepieces of the Conservative manifesto, are designed to end the “scandal” of higher death rates at weekends.
Studies have suggested that up to 11,000 extra patients are dying each year after being admitted to hospital over the weekend.
“We have had too many studies now telling us that newly born baby mortality rates are 7 per cent higher at weekends, emergency surgery mortality 11 per cent higher, stroke mortality 20 per cent higher, cancer mortality 29 per cent higher,” Mr Hunt said.
“No doctor would want to leave that problem unaddressed. We have to recognise that healthcare is a sevenday industry.”
Mr Hunt is determined to change junior doctors’ contracts to increase levels of cover at the weekend. Under the deal, additional pay for working at weekends would be cut, in exchange for an 11 per cent rise in basic pay.
Mr Hunt says that the deal would mean that 99 per cent of junior doctors would have their pay protected, or receive a rise.
The BMA, however, has claimed it may lead to doctors being overworked because safeguards to ensure they do not do excessive hours are being reduced. It has also said some junior doctors could see their pay cut by up to 30 per cent.
The claim has infuriated Mr Hunt, who has accused the BMA of “misinformation”.
The Health Secretary is sending letters to every junior doctor in the country to set out the details of its deal in a last-ditch attempt to stop them from “rushing out and manning the barricades”.
“Why would any government or any Health Secretary ever want to cut the pay of a group of doctors working as hard as they do?” he said. “They are the backbone of the NHS – it would be complete and utter madness to do that.
“One of the most disappointing things about this dispute has been the amount of misinformation that has gone around about what the Government is trying to do.
“We are not cutting pay for junior doctors. But I can understand that if you are being told the Government wants to cut your pay you would feel desperately undervalued. That is fuelling a lot of the anger.”
Mr Hunt argues that the current system is unfair on junior doctors, who have to work at weekends without the support they would enjoy during the week.
“We also have to recognise that what happens at the moment is that because we don’t staff our hospitals as well at weekends as we should, it massively increases the pressure on the doctors who are asked to work weekends,” he said.
“If you turned up at Heathrow on a Sunday and they said, ‘I’m really sorry, because it’s a weekend you are not going to get a co-pilot to take this plane across the Atlantic,’ you wouldn’t be very happy as a pilot but too often that’s what we ask our junior doctors to do.
“At the moment junior doctors take all the pressure. If I was a junior doctor I would want this new contract because I would want to know that the support that I get around me when I go into work at the weekend is the same as I get in the week.”
Mr Hunt is clear he will not back away from his plans for a seven-day NHS. “There is no point in doing this job if you are not thinking every single day about what you can do to make NHS care safer,” he said. “This is absolutely our number one priority.”
‘To withdraw emergency care is saying you won’t be there for patients even in lifethreatening situations’