Junior doctor: Striking is 'one of the most difficult decisions of my career'
Ahead of Tuesday's landmark strike by junior doctors after talks with the government failed to resolve a dispute over pay and contract, Dr Aoife Abbey explains why she will be standing on the picket line.
I am a junior doctor. Tomorrow I will be participating in the first doctor’s strike to take place in over thirty years. There are newspapers that will call it historic, but for me it will be one of the most difficult decisions of my career.
On a personal level, I believe that the right to strike is fundamental not just for doctors or the public sector, but for all workers. Would the tabloids use this information to smear me as "hard-left"? Probably, but the truth is I stand neither in the ranks of the "hard-left" nor the "staunch-right". In fact to all those who stand in Westminster and pull the strings of power, I may be little more than invisible, but to the patient in front of me I am often everything.
I am sure that sounds melodramatic or egotistical; it isn’t meant to. Standing at the foot of somebody’s bed and knowing that just for that moment you have the opportunity to help them in whatever way, big or small, is a privilege.
It is also a massive responsibility and it is not just because I know how it feels to help a patient, but because I also know how it feels to make a mistake, that I will be on the picket line on Tuesday.
The row over the imposition of a contract which junior doctors feel is fundamentally unfair and unsafe has played out now in the media for five months.
There have been what can only be described as underhanded attempts to smear junior doctors' characters and genuinely unsettling accusations that the Department of Health chose to capitalise in the wake of the Paris attacks by editing a letter from the ‘independent’ head of our NHS, Sir Bruce Keogh.
As a junior doctor I read the reputed leaked email “the more hard-edged you can be on this, the better” and wondered…the better for who?
The reality is that junior doctors have a few basic demands of their contract. We feel our working conditions must be safe for patients, fair to us and supportive of the NHS as an institution. Unfortunately this message is fast being drowned out.
The Department of Health repeatedly refer to statistical excess in deaths as if they were de facto "preventable deaths", a pitfall that Sir Bruce himself has warned them against, and claim that the contract supports a better "7-day NHS".
The conflation of contract proposals with plans for a "7-day service" is deeply distressing for junior doctors. I am not going to sit here and tell you that there are not areas where emergency care at the weekend could be improved, but the contract proposals are not the answer to this problem.
Spreading an already stretched and understaffed medical workforce more thinly is not a solution to the problems in the NHS. I am fully supportive of an NHS which is able to give the same high quality emergency and urgent care to patients twenty four hours a day seven days a week but the strategy must be transparent, reasonable and more importantly, evidence based.
The strategy must be part of a realistic look at the expanded funding and increase in social and support services to backup the plan. This is what we owe the people who rely on the NHS.
Tomorrow will see junior doctors withdraw non-emergency labour only. Thankfully we also have the support of our consultant colleagues and so when I stand on the picket line, I am assured that patient safety will be maintained. Do I regret the inconvenience to elective and non-urgent services? Of course I do, but for me the alternative is worse.
Tomorrow I will stand on the picket line; for myself, for my patients and for the NHS.
These are the personal views of Dr Aoife Abbey