Junior doctors are protesting in London today against possible changes to their contract hours which are being proposed by the Health Secretary.
Meanwhile, according to one of the junior doctors at the central London protest, Animesh Singh, “I have looked at the contract proposal with an accountant friend and looked at the kind of rotas I work”.
She said: ‘Jeremy Hunt is peddling a few vicious lies to the media, to patients and to the public in general’.
Dr Michael Moran (35) from Belfast, who works at Craigavon Area Hospital, said effective decision making and proficiency are issues if junior doctors are exhausted.
Dr Johann Malawana, chair of the BMA’s junior doctors’ committee, said: “The outpouring of anger and frustration we have seen from thousands of junior doctors across the United Kingdom, culminating in today’s unprecedented gathering in London, must be a wake-up call for ministers”.
The BMA has argued the deal could mean pay cuts of up to 30 per cent, with “normal hours” reclassified as being from 7am to 10pm, Monday to Saturday.
Extra payments for unsociable working will be earned only outside of these times, rather than the current arrangements of 7am to 7pm Monday to Friday.
They said they would not return until the government backed down from its proposal to extend a junior doctor’s routine working hours from 60 hours per week to 90 hours.
Thousands of junior doctors are also rallying in Belfast and Nottingham.
Huge crowds gathered in Whitehall, where government offices are located, to listen to speakers decry the move. Their cheers can be heard in Trafalgar Square and hundreds of them are holding banners and placards, with many wearing medical clothing. Others say “Tired doctors make mistakes” and “Quantitative easing for doctors not bankers”.
Protesters dressed in medical scrubs chanted “Hunt must go” and “Not safe, not fair, Jeremy doesn’t care”.
Campaigners say the new contract will abandon the rota planning system and the new 11-hour shift would only include one 20 minute break which they feel would present a risk to patient safety.
“The last thing we want is a patient not receiving good care because a doctor is not at his or her best”.
The leader of NHS junior doctors in England has urged Jeremy Hunt to stop treating them like “the enemy” and instead reopen negotiations in a bid to stop their threatened strike. “That is why this rally is so important – not just the medical staff but the patients”. He told the BBC it was “incredibly disappointing, the way that the BMA has misrepresented the government’s position”.
Mr Hunt said if he was a junior doctor and believed the Government was pushing through the changes claimed by the BMA he would also be protesting on the streets.
Mr Hunt said reductions in pay for working antisocial hours would be offset with an increase in basic pay.
However Mr Hunt told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the proposals would benefit doctors by reducing their maximum weekly working hours. He highlighted that the financial penalties are being removed because “that force hospitals to roster less at weekends”.
But parking charges are worth around £200m a year, vital money at a time when the NHS is so financially stretched.





