Why Jeremy Hunt is Forcing me out of the UK
I am an anaesthetist and I love it. I come from a family of doctors and I am proud to have a job that saves people’s lives. No day is ever the same and I am constantly amazed by the incredible qualities that human beings can have at times of great adversity. I was asked recently if I would recommend my profession to my own children, as my family had once done. And sadly my answer was a resounding no.
This is the fault of one man.
Jeremy Hunt (how tempting his surname is to change), our gormless, muppet of a health secretary, is flexing his bullying muscles again. The newspapers have covered the issue of the junior doctors’ strikes widely – but this issue is about so much more than just junior doctors. I will aim to elaborate.
Jeremy is a man who has roundly lost the confidence and trust of the medical profession. This is a man that implied that hospitals were not staffed at weekends which lead to the #ImInWorkJeremy campaign.
This is a man who has deliberately misquoted a research article. He stated that there are 11,000 preventable deaths at weekends each year. If you read the article, firstly the data was collected during one year: 2013/14. They defined the weekend as Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday (OK then!), the highest death rate was on a Wednesday (that’s not a weekend). If you were already in hospital on the weekend you were more likely to stay alive (Er Mr Hunt… I thought no one worked on the weekend?) and if you were admitted on the “weekend” – Friday-Monday – you were more likely to die 30 days later. But the authors also stated that to conclude how many of the 11,000 deaths that occurred were really ‘preventable’ would be “rash and misleading”.
Due to Jeremy Hunt’s “rash and misleading” statements we have seen patients who are sick and need help avoiding hospitals at weekends because they are under the impression that there are no doctors to treat them. Well done, Mr Hunt!
Our Health Secretary, this irresponsible, unethical man in charge of the NHS, has only succeeded in doing harm.
These statements are particularly hurtful because all of us NHS workers have made sacrifices for our jobs. I have missed Christmases, New Years, funerals and weddings. I have put strangers’ needs before those of my own family. I have seen some horrendous things and held the hands of people going through the worst moments of their lives; balanced out by the joy of a mother seeing her child for the first time, the knowledge that tomorrow a lady will be walking pain-free on her new hip, or a man will see again once his cataract has been removed.
However, in the last year (according to our government) this sacrifice of our own lives and the effect it has on our families and friends, doesn’t happen.
Apparently, all the times I have had to call someone to pick up my daughter from school because I am running late due to my patients’ needs – they didn’t happen. What about the time that I stayed late after my night shift to explain to a family how their loved one died? Or the time that my friend stopped talking to me because I was unable to attend his mother’s funeral? Are these moments not happening to us medical professionals every day either, Jeremy?
#I’mInWorkJeremy
But as vilified as Jeremy Hunt is among the medical community, the issue is not just about him. The issue is about the “Truly Seven Day NHS”, the Conservative manifesto promise that underlies much of this argument. Yes, that’s right, Cameron, Osborne and co have all had their grubby fingers in this deadly pie.
This ill-thought-out promise has been bulldozed through Parliament by political muscle, because politicians can’t possibly admit that they have made a mistake and back down. In the meantime, once again, they play ping pong with the NHS.
I don’t do my job to be thanked. I don’t do it for the money. I do it because I want to make a difference in people’s lives. Yet I feel that I can’t do my best at my job anymore and that is purely down to things that I cannot control.
The Health Service that I work so hard for is being dismantled and downtrodden.
There is not a doctor in this country that would not like better staffing at the weekend – we have all despaired over not being able to get ultrasounds, imaging and investigations done until Monday simply because these departments aren’t staffed – these departments, by the way are not run by doctors. Doctors cannot work alone. I cannot do my job without operating department practitioners, heath care assistants, scrub nurses and surgeons – not to mention an operating theatre that is clean and stocked, porters to transport equipment, and patients and pharmacists to provide the drugs that I need.
Simply having more doctors on a Saturday and Sunday (without the support staff) will not solve anything.
On another occasion, Mr Hunt has been quoted as wanting more consultants to work at weekends. As a consultant I already work one weekend a month on top of the on-call and emergency service. How much more can he stretch people?
And here is the most unbelievable part…
The Government wants to fulfill their election promise of a 7 day NHS service… without investing an extra penny more into our crumbling health care system.
Is anyone else finding that this doesn’t really add up?
How can you have a 7 day service without increasing the staff? A staff that barely manage to run a 5 day service? A staff who have come under pressure for the last 5 years to make efficiency savings amounting to £20 billion. From where I’m sitting, you either get the already overworked and stretched workforce to work even harder – because that would be great for the already all-time low morale – or you thin out the 5 day service over 7 days. Neither of these sound particularly appealing to me. It certainly doesn’t seem like it would be better, fairer or safer to patients either.
The sticking point in the current junior doctor dispute was the definition of Saturday as ‘normal working hours’. Today normal working hours are defined as 7am to 7pm Monday to Friday (already longer than what most would consider sociable), any time outside of this is anti-social hours. The government wants to redefine what is considered sociable hours, after contract imposition junior doctors’ sociable hours will be 7am-9pm Monday to Friday and 7am to 5pm Saturday.
Currently, the hospital trusts are fined if doctors work too many anti-social hours, and this is monitored through regular diary card exercises. This safeguard is being removed! The concern is that doctors will be indiscriminately asked to work these much longer hours with no penalties for trusts abusing the boundaries.
Suddenly, the maths is starting to add up – same number of doctors, more hours – same amount of money… very little regard for tired doctors who make more mistakes. Is that contributing to Patient Safety, Mr Hunt?
Because of these proposed changes, being a doctor in this country is becoming increasingly difficult. Especially as I had the audacity to have a child and husband. Trying to juggle family commitments and the needs of my child already requires a lot of organisation and planning – and I do this without complaint. I took all this on when I chose to become a doctor. I knew what I was signing up for but I am not willing to give anymore of myself to my work. I can’t do that to my family, my life or my health any more.
I am at my limit.
I, like many others, are considering my options. I have a very transferable skill. The world will always need doctors, I will be able to do my job anywhere and if I can do it with better resources and recompense, why wouldn’t I choose to go abroad? I am being forced to put the ones I love above my patients, and that’s hard to stomach when I have dedicated so many years to helping others.
Every time these thoughts go through my head I feel a sense of guilt. How can I walk away from the NHS? This service is great. It gave me my education and training, it cared for my father, it cared for me, it gave me my daughter. Each time the guilt hits me, I have to ask myself, how much more can I give?
Us medical professionals are taught that we must check for safety before we approach the scene of an accident, because if we get hurt we can’t do any good. But it’s too late for my colleagues and me, we have already been hurt. The Tory Government have made the NHS no longer safe to approach.
(Note from The Editor. Many thanks to Dr Upeka Ranasinghe for her open and honest response to the NHS crisis. For more information about the situation, take a look at the bma.org.uk website. To read more from Dr Upeka Ranasinghe click here to see her author page.)
