Re: Junior Doctors strike.....

What I don't understand is if Junior Doctors are not happy with the conditions then why don't they find another job they will be happy in.

If they don't like it then the patients are the ones who are going to suffer no one else

Re: Junior Doctors strike.....

Doc one small point...

Its not that more people die at the weekend its if you are admitted at the weekend you have more chance of dying than some one admitted in the week days.

You could be taken into hospital on a Friday night and die the next Wenesday.

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2...itted-weekends

Re: Junior Doctors strike.....

My last comments weren't referring to your post JBR but to Moreover's.

Of course there is a problem with a shortage of doctors but I believe they are addressing that by recruitment, but it takes time to train them. In the mean time they have to look at other means.

There is of course another problem with recruitment which has some bearing on this. I read somewhere the other day where many of the new trainees intended working only part time or going to work abroad. Perhaps there should be some stipulation that they work here and full time for the first few years of their career.

Re: Junior Doctors strike.....

I'm amazed this thread is still going .... around and around, trying to attach blame onto the government, or indeed anyone for that matter, for this stand off.

It's simple innit?
The NHS is underfunded, overstretched and apparently filled with disgruntled staff.
Were it a normal industry it would have gone bankrupt... or sued out of existence due to medical malpractice and negligence claims.
And it probably will eventually go bump and be dismantled .... unless someone has a few billion to throw at it regularly (perhaps the UK could apply for some foreign aid to help).

Doctors who enter the profession must do so already knowing it involves long hours and allegedly low paid (only the 5th highest salary in the world).
So it would seem reasonable to assume the end objective is to do that training and climb that career ladder for the lucrative benefits of consultancy and private practice later. They're not all altruistic Mother Teresa types one step above voluntary charity workers.

I don't think Hunt's intellectually retarded and was surprised to see him described as such.
Like him or not he's trying to run an efficient NHS .. and provide a reliable service to the public at a cost the government can afford... ( on a shoestring).
Meanwhile, the NHS staff want acceptable wages and hours... and to achieve it are striking and withdrawing care.
It's a standoff neither side can win.
The public are the real losers. Something both sides seem to overlook.

The reality is we have less than clean wards, inadequate nursing care, overworked care workers .. and patients left on trolleys in corridors.
Back in 2000 when my mum was admitted another elderly lady fell out of her bed during the night, never recovered , and was wheeled quietly out of the ward when she died.
It certainly gave my mum new impetus to want to come home... from her morgue ward as it was jocularly known, which incidentally, her admittance to was arranged by a private consultant who got her an NHS bed 2 days after paying to see him.

As to remarks that the government's objective is to privatise the NHS?
Look at it another way ... it could be the doctors who will end up being the final straw that finally break the camels back.... because there's more that needs fixing in the NHS than there is that doesn't. .. but this has not deterred them from making their demands and striking.
To hope the doctors win might have repercussions no one likes.

Re: Junior Doctors strike.....

Yes this is awful! How do you suggest we make it better?

Experts in palliative care are few and far between, we have 1 consultant in the hospital I work at, with no junior doctors so she is the only person providing that level of expert advice and experience where I work. She does work with a palliative care nurse specialist who is absolutely brilliant but again just 1. This makes providing a 24 hour, 7 day a week, 365 day a year service practically impossible.

Palliative care is a very tough specialty to get into because there are very few training positions available every year, in fact the one CT2 grade doctor who has decided to go on and become a specialist registrar in my hospital has her heart set on becoming a palliative care consultant. She has applied for a training course in palliative medicine. She is still waiting to hear if there is even going to be any training positions in this area of medicine for 2016/17.

Re: Junior Doctors strike.....

It's interesting you should say that. In my experience a fair few eventually settle for part-time NHS and part-time jogging down the road to their private practices. Is this a usual long-term career plan?
And more odd .. at the clinic I went to (years back) more than half the consultants were actually Americans ( and very dishy they were too).

Re: Junior Doctors strike.....

The article you quote those figures from is from a bit of research that has now largely been superseded by the more recent research that was released this week.

It is not that the original research itself was flawed it was just misrepresented in the papers and in particular by Jeremy Hunt. In this original article the authors were very careful to state that they had found this apparent "weekend effect" but had not established what caused it. This more recent research looks at what causes the effect and found that it was more due to the statistics used and if you looked at the global death figure rather than the rate which is what the original paper looked at then in actual fact weekends were actually slightly better.

Re: Junior Doctors strike.....

I'll answer that when you answer some of my comments as to the morality of withdrawing your Labour from a profession you deem to be at risk by digisguising pay claims as fighting for to save the NHS.

Re: Junior Doctors strike.....

This is exactly what is happening!

Due to the way doctor training is provided in the UK, at certain stages of your training you are in an excellent position to up sticks and leave the UK doctors training system. These are mainly at the end of FY2, CT2, end of specialist registrar training and end of GP training.

In the hospital I work at as an FY1 we tend to work mainly with CT grade doctors on the wards and when we are on call so I have had an opportunity to ask them their plans next year. There are currently 9 CT2 grade doctors in the hospital.

1 doctor intends to apply for the next stage of training
1 doctor has decided to quit medicine completely
2 doctors have got jobs abroad (Canada and New Zealand)
5 doctors are undecided and will work as locums next year

This also fits with what the hospital have experienced in terms of recruiting for the CT1 positions next year with only 1 applicant for 9-10 places.

Re: Junior Doctors strike.....

There is a massive problem at the moment with recruitment and retention and in all honesty the claims for example that we will see 5000 more GPs by 2020 are laughable. The government as far as I know has absolutely no idea, as they do not collect figures, on the number of GPs currently working in th UK and whether they are full time, part time or locum. They also have no idea how many GPs are leaving or have left. They do know how many junior doctors are training to be GPs and this is currently one of the most undersubscribed specialties in the UK along with emergency medicine and psychiatry.

The most recent research shows that despite government reassurances that there will be more GPs the actual number has decreased by 2% over the last year with many more approaching retirement age.