Junior Doctors’ Contracts — House of Commons, 2015-10-28
Topic: Health
Sarah James (Wollaston) (Conservative, Centre-right): I start by declaring a relevant personal interest in that my daughter is a junior doctor, and one of many hundreds who have moved to Australia to work. Because of that very clear conflict of personal interests, I shall abstain in this evening’s vote. I want to speak, however, because I have relevant personal experience, as before I came to this place I taught junior doctors and medical students for 11 years I can tell the House that this dispute is about far more than pay. It is about junior doctors feeling valued. The junior doctors I used to teach, including F2 foundation year doctors, felt that they were not being supported at the weekends, disliked the inability sometimes to work in the same county as their partner and disliked obstructive attitudes about rostering. That presents us with an opportunity to bring all those issues into the negotiations in this current dispute One thing I do know is that young people do not go into medicine because they are motivated by pay. I hope that the House sends a very clear message to junior doctors that we value what they do and are grateful for what they do on behalf of patients. What we must do is avoid a strike at all costs. A strike would be immensely damaging for patients. I would say to junior doctors that there is no meaningful industrial action that they can take that would not harm their patients. I urge them to step back from such a move. A strike would be damaging not only for patients, but for the professional reputation of doctors, and of course politically. That should not be the consideration. Our main consideration should be how we encourage junior doctors to walk back through the door of the Secretary of State’s office, as he has stated. The best way to do that would be to start again Many elements of the dispute feel similar to the one we had in 2007, when I was teaching junior doctors, over the medical training application service—or MTAS, as it was known. It was a very unloved, unlovely scheme that collapsed, after a much-needed apology, in 2007. The Government of the day went back to the drawing board and started again. I think it would be right to do so on this occasion. We need to remove the barricades that are preventing junior doctors from walking back through the door. It would be right to take away the preconditions, the red lines and the threat to impose—and start again, looking at all the issues in the round. Junior doctors share many of the Government’s objectives. They want to improve care for patients; they recognise that shortage specialties in the NHS are a real issue and that if we are going to put patients first, we need to incentivise entry to specialties such as accident and emergency, general practice, psychiatry and so forth. We need mechanisms to make that happen. They recognise, too, the need to address variation across the NHS, including with respect to weekends, but we need to look at that in the round. It is not just about senior and junior doctors either; it is about nursing, access to diagnostics, being an outlier on a ward that someone should not be in because the hospital is over-full.