If you're not worried you should be !!

Pr4wn wrote:This bill is probably the most authoritarian and evil piece of legislation that's ever been pushed through in modern Britain. Cameron seeks to squeeze the life out of his opposition while continuing to allow his own fat-cat dodgy donors to give as much as they like.

Pr4wn wrote:It's a simple attempt by Cameron to squeeze the life out of his opposition. It's not democracy at all.

Toppy, your arguments about Unions (democratically-run institutions, by the way, with elected leaders) could easily be extended to large corporates (obviously non-democratic) and wealthy private donors. Cameron is perfectly happy to keep the dodgy private money flowing in with no regulation whatsoever. Money from those that lobby, of course, they don't donate out of the kindness of their hearts.

Paint the unions however you want but all they're trying to do is use the law and their rights to secure better pay and working conditions for their members.

This bill is pure evil. There's no other way to describe it.

TopHat24/7 wrote:...The current junior doctor's strike is about the only example in at least a decade which I can think of that has any real moral currency.

Pr4wn wrote:I'm not even going to bother responding. I'm done with this section.

Sorry.

TRUSSMAN66 wrote:If it's any consolation to you....I have !!....

navyblueshorts wrote:

TopHat24/7 wrote:...The current junior doctor's strike is about the only example in at least a decade which I can think of that has any real moral currency.

Says whom? I'm pretty sure that what all aspiring doctors wrote in their Personal Statements while trying to get into medical school isn't commensurate with this behaviour. It has no more moral currency than many other strikes and less than many given the potential health effects on patients.

DAVE667 wrote:Would have a fit and rested doctor and a fit and rested train driver if I'm honest. Plans to introduce all night tube services have the making of a disaster written all over them

DAVE667 wrote:Would have a fit and rested doctor and a fit and rested train driver if I'm honest. Plans to introduce all night tube services have the making of a disaster written all over them

DAVE667 wrote:Would have a fit and rested doctor and a fit and rested train driver if I'm honest. Plans to introduce all night tube services have the making of a disaster written all over them

TopHat24/7 wrote:

DAVE667 wrote:Would have a fit and rested doctor and a fit and rested train driver if I'm honest. Plans to introduce all night tube services have the making of a disaster written all over them

Shift patterns and hours worked unchanged.  So this is baloney.

Tube drivers would be in just as fit a state for night tubes.  It's just about money, and them being scum.

DAVE667 wrote:

TopHat24/7 wrote:

DAVE667 wrote:Would have a fit and rested doctor and a fit and rested train driver if I'm honest. Plans to introduce all night tube services have the making of a disaster written all over them

Shift patterns and hours worked unchanged.  So this is baloney.

Tube drivers would be in just as fit a state for night tubes.  It's just about money, and them being scum.

Most shift workers end up being frigged with disorientation...not too bad at ASDA but on the trains it's probably worse. 4am is disaster time.

TopHat24/7 wrote:

navyblueshorts wrote:

TopHat24/7 wrote:...The current junior doctor's strike is about the only example in at least a decade which I can think of that has any real moral currency.

Says whom? I'm pretty sure that what all aspiring doctors wrote in their Personal Statements while trying to get into medical school isn't commensurate with this behaviour. It has no more moral currency than many other strikes and less than many given the potential health effects on patients.

You think being forced to work longer hours, in a job where you're their to focus on saving people's lives, or take a pay cut, having spent 7 years studying and working and being in the elite of your academic cohort, is the same as a unqualified uneducated numpty on £50K pa+ demanding more money and inflation busting pay INCREASES? Or, may favourite RMT strike, one of the few not about blackmailing more pay - striking because one of your colleagues got fired for REPEATEDLY turning up drunk??

TRUSSMAN66 wrote:Rather have a fit doctor than a tired one looking after my family...

Ipsos mori poll..

66 percent support the junior doctors (simply because it's anti-Government)..
16 percent disagree..
18 percent unsure..

Glad to say public opinion is on my side of the argument..

DAVE667 wrote:Would have a fit and rested doctor and a fit and rested train driver if I'm honest. Plans to introduce all night tube services have the making of a disaster written all over them

TopHat24/7 wrote:

DAVE667 wrote:Would have a fit and rested doctor and a fit and rested train driver if I'm honest. Plans to introduce all night tube services have the making of a disaster written all over them

Shift patterns and hours worked unchanged.  So this is baloney.

Tube drivers would be in just as fit a state for night tubes.  It's just about money, and them being scum.

TopHat24/7 wrote:

navyblueshorts wrote:

TopHat24/7 wrote:...The current junior doctor's strike is about the only example in at least a decade which I can think of that has any real moral currency.

Says whom? I'm pretty sure that what all aspiring doctors wrote in their Personal Statements while trying to get into medical school isn't commensurate with this behaviour. It has no more moral currency than many other strikes and less than many given the potential health effects on patients.

You think being forced to work longer hours, in a job where you're their to focus on saving people's lives, or take a pay cut, having spent 7 years studying and working and being in the elite of your academic cohort, is the same as a unqualified uneducated numpty on £50K pa+ demanding more money and inflation busting pay INCREASES? Or, may favourite RMT strike, one of the few not about blackmailing more pay - striking because one of your colleagues got fired for REPEATEDLY turning up drunk??

navyblueshorts wrote:

TopHat24/7 wrote:

navyblueshorts wrote:

TopHat24/7 wrote:...The current junior doctor's strike is about the only example in at least a decade which I can think of that has any real moral currency.

Says whom? I'm pretty sure that what all aspiring doctors wrote in their Personal Statements while trying to get into medical school isn't commensurate with this behaviour. It has no more moral currency than many other strikes and less than many given the potential health effects on patients.

You think being forced to work longer hours, in a job where you're their to focus on saving people's lives, or take a pay cut, having spent 7 years studying and working and being in the elite of your academic cohort, is the same as a unqualified uneducated numpty on £50K pa+ demanding more money and inflation busting pay INCREASES? Or, may favourite RMT strike, one of the few not about blackmailing more pay - striking because one of your colleagues got fired for REPEATEDLY turning up drunk??

A knee-jerk response based on historical rose-tinted specs re. the medical profession. I'm not saying they don't have any gripes (pretty much the same as most striking workforces I'm sure) but you're getting your info from where exactly? You know even less about the veracity of the issues being discussed than the doctors and too many of them know only what their Union tells them. By all means don't believe what the Government line is but don't go all starry-eyed over what the BMA says just because it's the BMA. The doctors have been political for as long as they've existed.

If they don't want to work more than 48-hour weeks, no-one can force them:

http://www.nhsemployers.org/your-workforce/need-to-know/european-working-time-directive

If it's so bad, they could at least work-to-rule instead of f*cking up the care of so many patients and putting them at risk.

TRUSSMAN66 wrote:Rather have a fit doctor than a tired one looking after my family...

Ipsos mori poll..

66 percent support the junior doctors (simply because it's anti-Government)..
16 percent disagree..
18 percent unsure..

Glad to say public opinion is on my side of the argument..

Corrected one bit.
Also, a missing stat: 95% of the public haven't a clue what the issues are or the truth of what's going on.

DAVE667 wrote:Would have a fit and rested doctor and a fit and rested train driver if I'm honest. Plans to introduce all night tube services have the making of a disaster written all over them

No idea why the Tube isn't 100% automated. Then again, that would need IT and that's always an over-priced f-up.

TopHat24/7 wrote:

DAVE667 wrote:Would have a fit and rested doctor and a fit and rested train driver if I'm honest. Plans to introduce all night tube services have the making of a disaster written all over them

Shift patterns and hours worked unchanged.  So this is baloney.

Tube drivers would be in just as fit a state for night tubes.  It's just about money, and them being scum.

Now you really are showing your class bias. Doctors complaining about 'safety' = good for them. Train drivers complaining about 'safety' = scum!

Blame the British public for the junior doctors’ strike wrote:AT EIGHT this morning junior doctors in England began a 24-hour strike during which they are providing only emergency cover, equivalent to that provided on Christmas Day. Patients have been advised to avoid hospitals if possible, referring themselves to local clinics and pharmacists instead. The first industrial action by doctors for four decades, the strike has meant the cancellation of some 4,000 operations.

The medics (some of whom, despite the term “junior”, are actually quite senior) are angry at Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, over his proposal for a new contract, which he has threatened to impose on them if no agreement is reached. Picket lines are due to go up at hospitals again on January 26th and in February (when a total walkout is planned leaving consultants, nurses and temporary staff alone to treat emergencies). The details of the dispute are fiddly, concerning working hours, basic and top-up rates of pay and working-time rules. But there are two, quite straightforward, main disagreements.

The first is about how much the NHS should bear down on hospitals about doctors’ working time. After withdrawing from negotiations last summer the BMA, their trade union, returned to the table in December. The result was a memorandum of understanding in which the BMA, the Department for Health and NHS Employers agreed on a series of rules on the length of shifts, the frequency of long shifts and rest time between shifts, and on the creation of an independent “guardian” role responsible for policing the enforcement of these rules at each NHS trust. But the BMA contends that this is not enough; that in a hectic hospital environment it can be too easy for doctors to have to work dangerously long hours, especially given the withdrawal of certain penalties for hospitals that exceed these limits. It argues that the rules should go farther (for example, it wants consecutive long shifts to be capped at three rather than the offered five) and wants the guardian role to have more teeth.

The second is about whether work in evenings and on weekends should command a higher value than that between 7.00 and 19.00, Monday to Friday. If you think the answer to that is “no”, then it is hard to disagree with Mr Hunt when he claims his reforms will leave 99% of junior doctors better, or no worse, paid than they are now. If “yes”, then the conclusion is less certain: though the basic pay for doctors will rise, partly to compensate for the end of automatic increments for seniority, top-up pay for unsocial hours will no longer be paid for Saturdays or weekday evenings between 19.00 and 22.00. Moreover, as this will make it cheaper for hospitals to roster doctors during these hours, more will be working time for which they were previously paid a premium. If the value of their work in this time is indeed greater than during the “normal” working week, it is fair to say that more than 1% will probably lose out.

That the dispute is hard to arbitrate reflects the fact that the factors in contention—the number of hours a doctor can safely work and the stringencies needed to enforce them; the value of time at different points in the day and week—all contain a large qualitative component (though both sides have reams of quantitative studies saying different things). The health service is fleshy and human. Like the body, it runs on a series of delicate balances, not binary switches. Hence the ambiguities and mutual incomprehension that swirl around the dispute and that have made a resolution, thus far, impossible.

As such, blame for the strike is quite diffuse. Mr Hunt’s goal of a seven-day NHS is laudable but he took far too long to realise that the way he was presenting it implied that doctors were not working hard enough. Already at breaking point (many British junior doctors are leaving for the Australian and New Zealand health systems), lots of medics immediately turned against him. Over-simplifying clinical research underlying the case for the reform, documenting higher death rates in the system on weekends, was a similarly unforced error. Thus seeds of resentment were sown that have been nurtured perhaps too enthusiastically by the leadership of the BMA, whose rallies resonate to unfounded claims that Mr Hunt wants to privatise the NHS and to juvenile abuse of a health secretary who—the doctors neglect to acknowledge—has a manifesto commitment to fulfil. The doctors are within their rights to strike (daily tolerating punishing hours and thankless conditions at an hourly pay rate that would insult many in less skilled jobs), yet their decision to do so seems odd after talks at which, even the BMA conceded, progress was made. That the rhetoric surrounding the strike suggests that the very existence of the NHS is at stake, and not just the exact pay and protections of a portion of its staff, perhaps concedes that the details of the matter do not, unembellished, match the scale of the action.

Still, it is hard not to sympathise somewhat with both sides. Doctors have a hard lot and deserve better pay and conditions, not a questionable promise of razor-thin improvements. Mr Hunt, far from wanting to kill off the NHS, rightly intuits that the system only has a future for as long as taxpayers are willing to fund it—and is therefore concentrating heavily on improving patient experiences (reportedly inspired by Eric Topol’s reformist “The Patient Will See You Now” on the future of medicine).

No, if there is one party in the Hunt-doctors dispute that deserves most criticism, it is the British public. This is the electorate that notionally adores the NHS, propels a mushy song by health workers to the top of the Christmas charts, happily accepts the left’s bogus insinuations that the only alternative is an American-style private health-care model, equally happily votes for Tory politicians promising to expand services to weekends and yet, despite all this, shows remarkably little willingness to pay more in tax towards what remains a relatively cheap system. If the BMA really wanted to change things, it would seek to disprove this argument by polling voters to establish where spending should be cut, or taxes raised, to pay for the seven-day NHS for which they have voted.

Otherwise, to remain viable at a time when the average citizen is getting wider and wrinklier, "our NHS" must tighten its belt by £30 billion by 2020, less than a third of which will be met by additional spending. It is in this context that Mr Hunt is trying to expand services to evenings and weekends. If he is straining to convince doctors that they should earn the same for working at these times as during normal hours, it is because he has no pot of cash with which to smooth the process. So pity the well-meaning health secretary, pity the hard-working doctors—and blame the sentimental but hypocritical British public.

Ent wrote:Easy as it will be covered by consultants - they've had months to plan around it.

Ewtd is averaged over 6 months so you can (and regularly do) exceed 48 hour weeks.

Work to rule would be absolutely devastating for patient care and safety, you'd have to ignore sick people to go home on time or take your breaks- one of the most mental suggestions I've ever heard.

Quite franky we as a nation should be proud of the action taken, keeping quiet and just getting on with things is how 100s of people died at mid Staffordshire hospital. The Francis report called for this type of thing.

navyblueshorts wrote:

Ent wrote:Easy as it will be covered by consultants - they've had months to plan around it.

Ewtd is averaged over 6 months so you can (and regularly do) exceed 48 hour weeks.

Work to rule would be absolutely devastating for patient care and safety, you'd have to ignore sick people to go home on time or take your breaks- one of the most mental suggestions I've ever heard.

Quite franky we as a nation should be proud of the action taken, keeping quiet and just getting on with things is how 100s of people died at mid Staffordshire hospital. The Francis report called for this type of thing.

Excellent! Glad to have you commenting.

Educate me on what's really going on then. What's a typical working week for a foundation doc (be honest)? What, exactly, is being proposed that would have a negative effect on safety? Is there really nothing else that can be done other than put patient safety at risk? Is it really nothing to do with pay?

Ent wrote:Depends on exactly what the job is, not all juniors are foundation doctors either. There are 48000 thousand junior doctors within the NHS so I can't really outline everyone's week.

Main risks to patient safety are removal of safe guards with regards to working hours and risk of brain drain.

Industrial action doesn't put patient safety at risk.

Would have been a strike a long time ago if it was about pay, been  a pay freeze for something like 6 years in NHS. Proposed restructuring reduces gross pay by up to 30%, take home even more.

Lots of other contentious points within.

Ent wrote:Sums on pay;

http://www.bishley.com/junior-contract/wp-content/uploads/1970/01/junior-contract-modelling-v1.1-slides.pdf

Another overlooked issue is the future repercussions. Once doctors evenings and Saturdays are rebranded as normal working hours agenda for change will be next.

Agenda for change is the system by which 1 million NHS employees are paid, that is where the real saving comes in.

Ent wrote:Because he's a liar.

Consultants can cover all work safely for short periods when warned in advance, if anything it's safer.

TopHat24/7 wrote:

Ent wrote:Because he's a liar.

Consultants can cover all work safely for short periods when warned in advance, if anything it's safer.

Which would suggest an oversupply in junior doctors, if anything.

Pr4wn wrote:

TopHat24/7 wrote:

Ent wrote:Because he's a liar.

Consultants can cover all work safely for short periods when warned in advance, if anything it's safer.

Which would suggest an oversupply in junior doctors, if anything.

Ridiculous statement.

Consultants that would have been working the routine operations that were postponed. Very simple.

But go ahead, twist it to fit your ridiculous narrative, if you like.

TopHat24/7 wrote:It still points to the fact that, if the strike has sooooooo little impact, the neccessity of those junior doctors is undermined.  

Look at the difference when there's a tube driver strike.

My actual inference, is that the Drs are important and seriously needed and that the impact of their strike (especially the BMA mooted total down-tools) is greater than admitted to.