They can't even agree that submarines are good at hiding anymore.
Politics at Westminster | BREAKING: UKIP
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik (@Rood) is joined by CEO Duncan Drasdo and Financial Director Andy Green from the Manchester United Supporters Trust for a special episode on all things behind the scenes at Old Trafford including a brief history of MUST and their aims today, views on INEOS and Sir Jim Ratcliffe so far, and the Old Trafford regeneration.
in fairness negotiations had reached an impasse so it was the likely outcome
I'm interested to find out if the stories about Hunt vetoing the deal that was agreed between the BMA and the DoH are true. If it turns out that he did, then surely he'll be toast.
Bad news. Hunt hasn't handled this as well as he might. These are the doctors who already work a 7 day week. How is he going to cope with the consultants who don't. He certainly won't be imposing a contract on them without losing his job.
As a junior doctor, I'm devastated. The imposition of the new contract will almost certainly lead to an exodus of doctors abroad and deteriorating morale in a workforce that is already overworked and underpaid.
Hunt has shown himself to be a coward with no respect for the NHS and has blamed everyone but himself. He has to go. So much for democracy, Mr. Cameron.
Hunt has shown himself to be a coward with no respect for the NHS and has blamed everyone but himself. He has to go. So much for democracy, Mr. Cameron.
Hunt should have been removed from his post long since, if for no other reason that he has become an extremely toxic presence (understandably) in negotiations, Similarly, it might not be a bad idea were those representing junior doctors to be freshened up somewhat. It has reached a point where i'm not sure if i trust either of the parties involved.
Do you mean the doctors who charge £100s for a 10-15 minute consultation at the private hospital down the road? They'll feel quite secure i imagine.
Do you mean the doctors who charge £100s for a 10-15 minute consultation at the private hospital down the road? They'll feel quite secure i imagine.
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I think he should go, if for no other reason than he's an incompetent moron who has received donations from investors linked to private healthcare (even a loose relation should have exempted him from the position) and has done nothing but denigrate, condescend and insult doctors at every opportunity to try and undermine their concerns over his supposed "fair" contract. And that's not even mentioning his fabricated statistics. He was clearly put into position to continue the Tories' (Labour did it too) mission to carve up the last remaining public sector cash cow and deliver it to their chums, but they underestimated the public's backing for the NHS. The media have been running on overdrive trying to paint junior doctors as money grabbers in an attempt to sway public opinion, but not enough people have fallen for it.
feck Hunt, feck the Tories, feck Labour, feck anyone else who tries to sell off public assets, feck the media at large for their biased reporting over the last few days, feck Hunt again and feck Juventus.
feck Hunt, feck the Tories, feck Labour, feck anyone else who tries to sell off public assets, feck the media at large for their biased reporting over the last few days, feck Hunt again and feck Juventus.
He should go, but there's a worry that in doing so he'll end up getting all of the criticism while the Tories themselves get off without any. Note that the defence of him from plenty of Tories has been relatively light considering the pressure he's under. His ship is sinking, and I don't think anyone else is particularly interested in hopping on to keep it afloat. He'll be replaced by someone else who gets criticised heavily eventually. Gove's done education...maybe he'll get thrown onto health next, eh?
Nah, they should let Hunt keep the job. Forever.
I'm serious, don't give the bastard any chance to decide to retire from politics at the next election so he can "magically" fall into a job with a private healthcare company as an advisor or human coffee table or whatever job they can find for him.
fecking Tory fecking cnuts.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...uiry-into-junior-doctors-morale-a6867801.html
Hilarious.
'Yeah, Jeremy, turns out their morale is pretty shit and they all think you're a wanker.'
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...uiry-into-junior-doctors-morale-a6867801.html
Hilarious.
'Yeah, Jeremy, turns out their morale is pretty shit and they all think you're a wanker.'
I hope the junior Doctors get the best deal they can and find some solace in the job they all love but there are some things I can't help popping into my mind at this point.
When they stop all these operations by going on strike, how exactly is this different to say a tube strike?
Where are all the people who condemn the teachers striking because it means they have to have their own children for an extra day? Having had children I feel their pain but this strike is stopping actual pain from being stopped.
Where are the, they are holding everyone to ransom comments?
Where is the demand to break the white coated demons once and for all for because they really are making Britain the sick man of Europe? There is an enema within joke here but it eludes me for the moment.
If very smart and relatively well paid people are having their moral damaged by the prospect of working anti social hours for flat rate time how do they think the millions of very low paid workers many of whom work right alongside the junior doctors feel?
We seem to be class biased when it comes to our attitudes about strike action.
When they stop all these operations by going on strike, how exactly is this different to say a tube strike?
Where are all the people who condemn the teachers striking because it means they have to have their own children for an extra day? Having had children I feel their pain but this strike is stopping actual pain from being stopped.
Where are the, they are holding everyone to ransom comments?
Where is the demand to break the white coated demons once and for all for because they really are making Britain the sick man of Europe? There is an enema within joke here but it eludes me for the moment.
If very smart and relatively well paid people are having their moral damaged by the prospect of working anti social hours for flat rate time how do they think the millions of very low paid workers many of whom work right alongside the junior doctors feel?
We seem to be class biased when it comes to our attitudes about strike action.
Why would this be the case if the strike is about patient safety (as the junior doctors assure us)? Could it be that it's not about patient safety at all, but about pay and conditions? How would junior doctors moving abroad impact on patient safety in England?
It's fair to say it's about both. JD's work some pretty intense hours and are underpaid for what they do. Pointing out they'll get paid more elsewhere for working more reasonable hours doesn't undermine their concerns for patients.
If they can't cope with the workload then they are in the wrong profession.
The way that junior doctors are trying to blackmail the country by threatening to move abroad is appalling and it isn't being met with the public revulsion that it merits. The BMA have clearly done a very good PR job on this because nobody seems to be be calling them out on their startling contradiction/hypocrisy. To play the 'we're doing it for the patients' card only to then threaten to abandon the NHS for more money/fewer hours abroad insults the intelligence.
This government is making them start to agree with you and that's kind of the problem.
Out of interest do you not feel they are underpaid? Or are you just on a moral crusade for honesty amongst strikers?
How many Doctors are actually saying they're going to move abroad? A few? Alright, that's going to happen whenever an industry gets fecked over. The ones here in Oxford certainly aren't saying anything of the sort - they've had loads of events where the public can go talk to them, and there's been zero threats, just them explaining why they think the deal is unfair. And it certainly seems like the deal is unfair.
And wrong profession? They knew what they were getting into, but do you really want someone at the end of a 90 hour workweek performing an emergency operation on you? It's fecking insane. I can barely function at the end of rare 60 hour workweeks, and my job is piss easy.
They are not underpaid. The medical profession is unique and should not be compared to other sectors as far as pay is concerned, just as we do not say that members of the armed forces are underpaid due to the fact that the hours they work and the kind of work they do should (if you take it in isolation) merit significantly higher pay. If you want to compare them to other sectors it is worth bearing in mind that the pay in lots of the highest earning professions (the law, investment banking etc) starts out pretty shit for the workload. It's not uncommon for newly qualified solicitors and junior investment bankers to earn around minimum wage when you divide their pay by the insane amount of hours that they do. The remuneration comes later on and the last time I checked senior doctors earn an extremely good living....especially as most of them these days seem to top up their pay with private work.
Whenever the topic arises on Question Time there always seems to be a junior doctor in the audience threatening to move abroad if the contract is not changed. To me it seems to be one of the primary arguments that they make.
The 90 hour work weeks are an extreme example and I would be fairly confident in saying that no doctor is performing surgery at the end of a 90 hour week.
You need to lower your confidence then. Not only are they performing operations after having worked some rough hours, they're not even always fully trained in the operation they're performing. It's like finding how sausages are made, if you look deep enough you're going to be slightly sick at the thought of it.
Fully trained surgeons (after they're done being junior doctors) work 50-60 hours a week, that's worrying enough.
Even if the doctors are being complete and utter bastards, trying to rip us off for better pay, we're ultimately still going to have to give it to them if many do intend to go abroad...in the same way we don't seem to push companies too hard on tax so that they'll stay. If we don't, more and more doctors will continue to move abroad, and less will go into the profession, which will be a massive problem long-term.
It's a combination of factors. Hunt claims the new contract is safer and fairer but this is simply not the case at all. In order to push forward his ideology of a 'truly seven day NHS' (we already work 24/7) he's essentially making us work more for less by spreading an already depleted workforce even thinly over the 7 days. He misquoted a paper about patient deaths over the weekend and is using that to propagate his agenda. I can honestly tell you that even under current conditions, I have never once left work on time. There are some weeks where I work close to 80 hours. Some night shifts I have worked 13 hours non-stop making life and death decisions, and the new contract seeks to stretch this even further. It is not safe, neither for doctors nor patients.
In countries like New Zealand, Australia and Canada, doctors are treated with a lot more respect and they have more control over their lives. They are not to trampled all over like Hunt is doing. So yes, in a way it is about conditions as well. A lot of my colleagues have already moved even before the imposition was mentioned, and some have quit and I think this will have exacerbated it more. There is a shortage of doctors as it is.
If you think I have an enormous wage packet, I can show you my pay slip. I'm earning £11.45 an hour, which is less than what a manager of Lidl earns. It's a misconception.
Things are so bad at the moment that I would not recommend anyone to do medicine (in England anyway). It just isn't worth it.
Pardon me for intruding but i've been thinking about this very point myself,
If we compare the salaries of junior doctors to those of a comparable station in the other emergency services, as well as members of the armed forces or nurses in the very same hospitals, their plight is probably better than most.
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I think it's fair to say we'd all love to see those people get a pay rise too.
I don't get the armed forces comparison. Maybe I'm ill-informed but is it not that one is a matter of 'dangerous occupation' the other one of the level of qualification required?
I graduated from uni after 5 years of studying with over £50,000 worth of debt (people graduating now would have even more now, paying £9000 per year). The level of responsibility, with all due respect to nurses and paramedics is more (although they're treated atrociously too). The starting salary for a Foundation Year 1 doctor just out of medical school is approximately £23k. With that they have to pay off their debts, NI contributions, taxes and finance their lives (for the record I'm living with my parents). Some of these doctors have to move locations every four months due to their rotation changing, and we practically build our lives around our jobs doing nights, days, weekends, bank holidays. I don't think we deserve a pay cut. In comparison MPs do none of the above, probably earn 2 or 3 times what I do and only yesterday it was announced that they were getting a pay rise.
There is more than enough demand to get into medicine. For a reason that is hard to fathom there are very tight limits on the number of places on UK medicine degrees.
I'm not a fan of Hunt and I don't dispute a lot of what you say, but I would have a great deal more sympathy if the arguments being made were focused more on things like greater investment and increasing the work force instead of being around pay. Of course on the surface pay is not the face of the argument but we all know that it is largely what this is all about.
On your wage packet...the majority of newly qualified solicitors are earning less than £11.45 per hour and to touch on a point made by @Nick 0208 Ldn so are newly commissioned military officers in elite units like the Royal Marines. It's a fact of the labour market (public and private) that very few people earn good money until they have racked up a number of years of experience.
Is it not also the case that 'junior doctors' includes many folks with a good number of years of experience?
It was ridiculous that he got to keep his post in the cabinet when the Tories won the election last year. He should have gone ages ago but looks like fat chance of that happening. Instead the majority of the blame seems to be put on the junior doctors.
I absolutely agree with you that we need to increase the work force and invest in our great NHS. But how can they expect to attract more doctors if this is how they treat them? Hunt has promised an extra 5,000 GPs by 2020 but at the rate things are going that looks near on impossible. Applications to specialty training this year were at an all time low (25% of GP training applications went unfilled this year), and the new contract is just going to force more doctors out of the NHS, which does nothing to address the problem.
Very likely, however bearing in mind that disparity i'm not sure whether pay is an argument should be pressed overly hard. And the future earning potential of many doctors will far outstrip their contemporaries in other services. The NHS is enough of a funding crisis as it is, with the coming decade's shortfall allegedly running into the tens of billions, can it even be afforded (more staff are in order as opposed to more wages)?
Awesome
Not once has hunt actually engaged with the junior doctors. Instead it's everyone's fault but his own (including the BMA), and now the imposition.
The new deal is going to hit specialties like A&E pretty hard as they already work most weekends (I used to work 1 in 3 weekends in A&E).
More taxes! All the taxes
Just on Hunt - I think he was a silly appointment. The Tories really should stop giving high profile jobs to people who can't give the impression of ever having experienced empathy. They wisely got Gove out of the way. Hunt's been lucky to last this long.
He does. And while his songs are soppy he's an ex-soldier that's been under fire, I think he's confident enough that he doesn't need to act the hard man.
There's a lot of demand to get in...but you've said yourself that many also want to go abroad once they've done their degree. And not to mention that there's been a lot of talk from people who have become disillusioned and want to leave. Then you've got the fact that having high demand doesn't necessarily mean you've got good doctors. The best will inevitably go to somewhere where they have better pay/conditions, whether that be another country or the private sector, unless the government are willing to be more generous to them.
And again, I imagine the tight nature of courses is so that only the top students are getting in.
That'll just about rule out all of them, then.
Indeed.
He saved us all from World War Three, don'tcha know!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11753050
I dunno. I mean, Osborne is a Lizard Person, so he doesn't count, but most of the rest do a much better job of pretending than the two I mentioned, I reckon.