NHS care ‘on a knife edge’ as junior doctors go on strike

instead of a stethoscope a banner that varied the messages but they all said the same thing even in the song there was a party atmosphere here right now but let's not forget this is one of the most serious

strike

s to ever hit to the NHS and it seems to be endless. in plain sight neither side has come to the negotiating table in the last few days and people are now talking about whether they have to bring in independent arbitrators ok despite the rumors he was on vacation the clerk of health appeared for a joint interview, Channel 4 News could not. we ask our own questions, we recognize the hugely important role they play within the NHS, so we stand ready to have meaningful and constructive conversations with them, as we have done with other health unions, as we have done in terms of responding in the budget to the concerns of

doctors

regarding their pensions so we are ready to talk to them but clearly a demand of 35 over £20,000 for some

junior

doctors

is neither fair nor reasonable a doctor is a doctor who is trained but below consultant level and are paid at different rates depending on their experience, the BMA says overall

junior

doctors have seen 26 real pay cuts since 2008 and are asking for a 35 increase to restore their salary when taking inflation into account.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies disputes these figures, they say. Using different data analyses, the erosion and pay is actually between 11 and 16, but no one disputes that there has been a drop in what junior medics take home alone as the first overnight port of call and asking for 10 pounds per hour for Doctor Who. over 10 years experience in the NHS and this could be the doctor doing his brain surgery ridding him of cancer informing his Scouts so we are asking for five to ten pounds an hour we can afford not to pay our doctors one two three four we can't take it anymore but the action is putting intense pressure on the NHS in England with up to 350,000 appointments and operations expected to be cancelled.

Nick Gladwell, who has bowel cancer, had his pre-op appointment rescheduled today, I shouldn't be getting involved, it's two parties at odds and I'm caught in the middle and feel like my life has been put on the line for money Trust leaders have raised concerns about overnight coverage and the impact on Services in the coming days with many expressing their frustration at the lack of movement in the negotiations something has to take, there has to be a leap of imagination on both sides to overcome this combative rhetoric, maybe it could involve some middleman to bring them together, but those talks have to happen.

MMA has been criticized for calling the

strike

over the Easter holidays and during Ramadan when fewer consultants were available, but they will take heart today with an ipsos poll showing more than half the public support their action Victoria McDonald, but now I join from central London to the politics of Lila Makai director of the NHS Confederation, the organization that represents the health system in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, thank you very much for coming, I don't know if you heard the report Victoria's there, but there was a cancer patient, Nick Gladwell, you know who had his. operation canceled and for him this is a matter of life and death is there anything you can say to people like him that is reassuring in these circumstances right now to handle capacity issues related to the departure of young doctors and has been the So many people across the country have been disappointed to receive postponements of their surgery and appointments and of course that's incredibly frustrating, it's so frustrating for the patients, it's also frustrating for the staff, and obviously, for the leaders as they work really hard to reduce those elective delays but right now everyone is working as hard as they can to keep as much Service as possible but really the priority needs to be the most urgent lifesaving and emergency

care

to keep the patient safety during this difficult week four days on strike we had three days on strike last month in march this is unprecedented isn't it true that four days is an incredibly long time to go on strike but the way that It has been programmed with Easter behind and then another correct weekend? up front that will really come down to about 10 days outage from which it will take a few weeks to fully recover I mean do you have any sympathy for junior meds?

I know there's some dispute about the numbers saying your salary has been cut by 26 over 10 years the if says it's actually more like 16 that's a crucial difference isn't it if you sympathize with them or the government in this? sitting down together and having a proper genuine conversation that is able to find common ground and come to a resolution are very far apart at the moment and that has led us to get stuck in some kind of stalemate and that's terrible for everyone, it's bad it's bad for doctors it's bad for patients it's bad for the rest of the NHS so really what we need to see here is a resolution and both sides will have to figure out how to achieve it but there's not even a glimmer of hope nowadays that that resolution or that willingness to compromise is somewhere on the horizon if the government is digging into it young doctors are digging into this it could last for months right now this stalemate is very worrying what we need What I don't see is that after of this strike, which is being so disruptive and so unwieldy, taking up so much capacity as everyone realizes the mitigations and many people have had their

care

interrupted, what we need to see now is a resolution that we can.

I don't get a repeat of this, so that's why we're really asking junior medical representatives in government to think about what they can do, for example, this might be the time to turn to ACAS and look at mitigation, like a mediation, since they both work together to find a solution and to fill those hours that the young doctors who are on strike are not filling, how much do they have to pay the Consultants to do their job well? I mean right now the Consultants have their own job so are they incredibly busy? A lot of Consultants of course have planned vacations over the Easter period, some of them have had to cancel that, but yeah, after Consultants have been working really hard to provide that coverage, where now of course we're seeing further away. break that they're going to need before they do because they're doing that coverage, so it's going to disrupt care now because the Consultants will have to cover the young doctors, not just the Consultants of course, but also the pharmacists, nurses and specialist doctors, and then, of course. they are going to have to skip some of the things that they were going to do again giving priority to the most urgent care.

It sounds like a disaster. Dr. Leonard McKay. Thank you so much. Dr Vasily Crispy, Junior MD and British Medical Association Fellow, is with me now in the Dr Crispy study. I mean, this is going to do some very real harm to patients, isn't it? The BMA has put patient safety at the forefront of our industrial action and we have already seen this with the March strikes that we can provide industrial action we saved the provision of emergency care thanks to our consultant and SAS doctors we listened because ultimately In instance, the care that we provide on a day to day basis is already unsafe for patients that we cannot meet the goals that the government set let alone the standards that we want and if it is already unsafe this strike will make it much worse, right?

So why are hundreds of thousands of operations and appointments being carried out? canceled that otherwise would not have been, for example, people are waiting for potentially life-saving heart surgery in the second highest priority category and some of their colleagues, senior cardiologists, say people could lose their lives. Do you accept what we are seeing? they are consultants and their doctors withdrawing to provide emergency care and we are sorry for those patients who are facing cancellations of their elective surgeries and procedures ultimately if we don't take a stand now we will simply see things worse within the NHS and I want to know if you think there will be avoidable loss of life due to this action this week like some senior cardiologists to say I don't think that's the case, we're putting Provisions in place and as we've already seen today trust can escalate ask the risks like we have provided in a hospital in somerset if that was the case the trusts have had 14 days to put all the emergency cover in place which was i dont want derogations on everyone else like the nurses did and also talking about what the nurses agreed to pause the strikes to negotiate with the government why medical assistants don't do that what we've seen with Mr Barclays that when they met before the first industrial action there was simply no mandate for him to negotiate a salary agreement with us in the second meeting after the second in the first industrial action, they were simply preconditions and not an offer on the table on the table where else you did not receive an offer before they negotiated nor the paramedics you negotiated an offer that is the point isn't it? you're saying you won't sit down until you get an offer what we're asking is mr barkley and his government come to our table and listen to our demand our opening statement is being challenged by mr barkley we're asking 35 for you our salary is restored to 2008 levels and this is simply not recognized our workforce is at a breaking point but the reason perhaps he is Questioning that 35 pay request is that he is asking it based on RPI inflation based on RPI now the measure hardly anyone uses it these days people use CPI so if you use that calculation the wage erosion is between 11 and 16 not 26 as you argue do you accept that the The fact that the government uses RPI, for example, to calculate tuition fees and student loans where doctors graduate with tens of thousands of debt on their shoulders is also a good measure for housing costs where doctors struggle with it too The office for national statistics says we don't think the RPI is a good measure of inflation and we advise against its use, so we would encourage the government to also stop using it for measures that are imposed not only on Gene's doctors but also the rest of the population that we are asking to have our wages restored just means bringing in without just telling me very briefly when you get below that 35 to negotiate it's not a red line it's our opening statement that still hasn't been it's accepted what we're talking about is there are reasonable moves we can make like the cost of license fees and the extremely expensive fees we pay in our year today from year to year costing us thousands of pounds. that is the starting point Dr Vasily crispy thank you very much for coming to talk to us