Striking doctors aren’t saving the NHS but hammering the last nail in its coffin
How the Hell can these doctors say they care about people, how can they see their pain, their tears, their fear - and just walk away? asks Carole Malone
I was on TV this week with a junior doctor called Andrew Meyerson, who tried to tell me that he and his Left-wing compatriots at the BMA felt “obligated” to go on strike this Christmas despite the fact it was going to put the elderly, the disabled and society’s most vulnerable people in danger.
It’s also going to stop thousands of people who are ready to be discharged from hospital from spending Christmas with their families because there is no one around to discharge them.
These strikes will also mean that for the next three weeks, the NHS will only be fully operational for FOUR days. Yes, that NHS YOU pay for, will have virtually shut down and 1.1m appointments will have had to be rescheduled.
Dr Meyerson kept saying how sorry he was for all these frightened, desperate people who are being abandoned and for those whose ops and appointments had been cancelled. Ditto for the distressed and tearful viewers who rang the show to say they’d been waiting up to two years for ops ( many in agony) which had now been cancelled because of the strikes.
Andrew, with a compassionate face, kept telling these people how sorry he was, how terrible he felt but there was nothing he could do.
But of course there was. He and his striking mates could have got their backsides out of TV studios and off the picket line and back into his hospital to help some of those desperate people out of pain. But no, apparently their determination “ to save” the NHS was too great to do what they’re actually paid ( rather well) to do – to help save lives.
The hypocrisy is staggering.
Meyerson also tried to say how very badly doctors were paid. I asked him outright what, as a third year Junior doctor, he was earning. At first he point blank refused to tell me( why I wonder when the BMA’s fight is all about pay)
I kept pushing, he kept saying he didn’t know. I told him he was talking tosh because everyone knows what they earn.
Eventually he said he gets £16 an hour – trying yet again to use the BMA’s disingenuous trick of comparing what junior docs earn to what baristas earn.
But it’s a lie. Baristas don’t ever end up earning upwards of £200,000 a year. Their salaries don’t go up year on year. They don’t have hugely generous pensions in part funded by the taxpayer. Nor can they expect the kind of upward career trajectory that doctors can.
Andrew claimed he was on just £16 an hour (which as a third year doctor I don’t believe) But whatever it is his hourly rate doesn’t incorporate the overtime, the bonus pay for out of hours work and for on call commitments. It doesn’t incorporate his very generous 20% pension contribution paid for by taxpayers.
Whatever tosh the BMA trots out these junior doctors are NOT on the bones of their backsides and are still some of the highest paid people in Britain. The average salary for a third-year junior doctor is £50,000. That’s not living on the poverty line.
Meyerson also intimated these striking junior doctors who are demanding a pie-in-the-sky 35% pay rise are actually heroes. But he couldn’t quite explain how putting people’s lives in danger at Christmas when cover is already sketchy might help save the NHS. All he could say was that people had been dying for years because of the dire state the NHS is in which in no way justifies wilfully and purposely putting them in danger.
No, these junior doctors are putting people’s lives at risk purely and simply for money. And they’re doing it to bring down these Tories they hate.
The truth is these Christmas strikes are literally playing Russian roulette with sick people’s lives. They have been staged at this time of year to cause the maximum damage to society’s most vulnerable. Every one of them who is currently on strike should be ashamed because this surely isn’t what they came into medicine to do? Or maybe saving lives isn’t their priority. Maybe political activism is which doesn’t bode well for sick people who are just pawns in the BMA’s sick political game
This week even the strike mediator, ACAS, told the BMA to call off its “morally indefensible” strikes. Tory MP Caroline Johnson who is also a working NHS doctor added: “Causing patients suffering in the pursuit of more money IS morally indefensible.
Striking doctors aren’t saving the NHS but hammering the last nail in its coffin
Whatever these striking doctors try to tell themselves they aren’t saving the NHS they’re hammering the final nail in its coffin. Because when people who’ve been trained to save lives can turn their backs on desperately ill people in the name of cold hard cash then our NHS really IS finished. No one can ever feel safe. How the Hell can these doctors say they care about people, how can they see their pain, their tears, their fear – and just walk away?
Yes, doctors should be well paid – but many already are. But those who can abandon sick people for money really are in the wrong job!
