Ian Pattison, Enfield and Lea Valley Socialist Party
After attacking resident doctors for striking over pay and funding, health bosses have U-turned, saying the strike was a good thing!
Why the U-turn? Health bosses say that senior staff – who cover for younger resident doctors when they strike – are more confident and quicker to discharge patients.
Even on BMA picket lines, striking doctors have told me the same. But the whole point is resident doctors are still learning and training. If it was only senior consultants running hospitals everyday, the NHS would collapse.
And health bosses are wrong. There’s a massive training crisis in the NHS.
Ambulance wait times, for example, mean paramedics can spend entire shifts sat in a car park, waiting to get their patient into A&E. They then don’t get trained seeing more complex cases. This spirals into fewer qualified paramedics, increasing ambulance wait times further.
One student paramedic said: “All too often I have shifts which start and end in a hospital car park. Uncomfortable patients will be asked the same questions and subjected to the same assessments, blurring the line between learning and simply irritating a patient, and depriving students of opportunities to practice core clinical skills.”
The Financial Times (FT) newspaper has bragged that on Christmas Day, the NHS bed occupancy rate was 81.2%, below the safe threshold of 85%. But at the time of writing it’s 92.1%!
Other problems persist. The FT points to worsening ambulance response times. They’re still falling well short of the NHS’s safe level target. And the number of people waiting over 12 hours at A&E is the most ever – over 40,000 again in December.
Resident doctors are striking to save the NHS, to make sure it is properly funded and staffed.
