Would you support the doctors' strike.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/portal/utils/pageresolver.fcgi?recordid=5652fb52642ecfa70d5f77e4

This is interesting. A review of what happens to mortality rates when doctors strike. It does not make things worse.
Admittedly, it's an old review, 2008, but I was sent it by email, and cannot find a newer one.

Didn't work. Here's the relevant bit.

"Take a look at this, from Doctors’ strikes and mortality: a review:

“A paradoxical pattern has been suggested in the literature on doctors’ strikes: when health workers go on strike, mortality stays level or decreases. We performed a review of the literature during the past forty years to assess this paradox… We identified 156 articles, seven of which met our search criteria. The articles analyzed five strikes around the world, all between 1976 and 2003. The strikes lasted between nine days and seventeen weeks.

“All reported that mortality either stayed the same or decreased during, and in some cases, after the strike.

“None found that mortality increased during the weeks of the strikes compared to other time periods.” "

A close friend,a retired consultant has just resigned from the BMA because of their attitude. He said that it was drummed into them on a daily basis that it was an honour and a privilege to serve the sick. He did work a 120 hour week as a junior doctor which was totally stupid and the following year he said there were two appointed to the same post. Now they complain they don't have enough experience when made consultant

So you are saying that 120 hours was totally stupid but they should still do it to get the experience?
Junior doctors do not complain about not having the experience. It's retired doctors who complain that we did it so they should.

www.theguardian.com/society/2015/nov/23/nine-in-10-gps-fear-missing-symptoms-workload-survey

81% of patients are happy with GP hours, but 10% of GPs are going to quit in the next year because of feeling overworked and underappreciated.
We need our GPs. Time someone told Jeremy Hunt that.

www.theguardian.com/society/2015/nov/22/patients-could-die-junior-doctors-strike-jeremy-hunt

Over 600 junior doctors have signed a letter to Hunt asking him to go to Acas with them because they do not want to strike.
No response from him so far. That does not sound like the BMA's attitude.

i support them, hunt has behaved despicably

It is dangerous going into hospitals at the weekend, people get sick every day of the week. What happened to the oath they take when becoming a doctor? My friend worked in a hospital and said "never get sick at the weekend and after August until January when new graduates start work.

If only people would not become ill or need emergency treatment at the weekends. How inconsiderate of them, don't they realise that we are still in the 19th century.
Of course ALL services of the NHS should be available 24/7,but that's but a dream.
My husband recently died whilst on holiday in Dubrovnik early on Saturday morning.
He was sent to the Pathology Dept. and the doctor phoned the pathologist who came in to assist us. This would never ever happen over here. Shame.

If only people would not become ill or need emergency treatment at the weekends. How inconsiderate of them, don't they realise that we are still in the 19th century.
Of course ALL services of the NHS should be available 24/7,but that's but a dream.
My husband recently died whilst on holiday in Dubrovnik early on Saturday morning.
He was sent to the Pathology Dept. and the doctor phoned the pathologist who came in to assist us. This would never ever happen over here. Shame.

When they regularly leave before seven and are not home before eight at the earliest.Regularly work nights and weekends.Work twelve consecutive days back to back.Have very little opportunity to see their children.Are often living due to the training system in areas of the country where their partners have no family support and very often run the service on good will.There must be something very wrong with the new contract for a 98% vote for strike action they are not militants.There are only so many doctors so to run a full seven day system would need extra staff at every level from cleaners porters,nurses lab staff etc,etc,where are they coming from,does this lead to a lower level of service during the week?

It is all very well supporting the junior doctors strike, but if it is you or yours that happen to fall sick at an inconvenient moment like after midday on Friday or on a strike period then you might find it concentrates your opinions in a rather different direction. I have been hospitalised twice quite recently and fortunately got through experience OK. There were times when it seemed that the Marie Celeste was over populated by comparison to the hospital. With so many wanting a larger slice of the salary cake there is inevitably less to go round. For my money junior doctors should have only a 5 day 40 hour week, BUT that would include Saturday and Sunday working as normal working days. Shifts could quite easily arranged around this. It happens in other areas of work why not hospitals. Work patterns have changed a great deal with more and more globalisation.

To organise more fully-staffed shifts you would need a lot more staff = more costs. The spin factor of Hunt's 'seven day week' health service is so obvious as well as the fact that he has never actually explained what he thinks it means. Hospitals do offer a 24/7 service but at some times (2 am or Sunday afternoon, for example) it's largely an emergency service. If you need to see a doctor at 2 am it should be because it's urgent. If it isn't urgent, surely you can wait till 8 am? And as Carolynswalsh says, to offer a full service all round the clock would need all the hospital staff, not just doctors. There must be some points in the 24 hours and the 7 days when even Hunt thinks hospitals do not need to offer a full service with a full complement of doctors, nurses, cleaners, labs, pharmacy, X-ray, scans, receptionists, secretaries, admin, physio, social workers, transport, porters, coffee shop.....

To have the same care at weekends it doesn't take a genius to work out - employ the same number of staff as in the week , not work a skeleton staff to exhaustion , too complicated for Hunt to work out ?

One thing we must remember is that medics exist in a global market. If we don't give our junior docs good pay and conditions they will vote with their feet. Thousands are doing this already. I read somewhere that 350 uk trained A and E docs are currently working in Australia. They're not just there for the surfing! We end up recruiting doctors from countries where they are desperately needed. We must pay our doctors well and make sure their conditions are tolerable.

Well I believe it is the nurses turn next.

There are about 1.3 million Britons living in Australia, so 350 British doctors working in A&E are not that many - and many of them do come back again.
We met one today.

No, let's just shake the magic money tree and maybe we could give the doctors fewer hours to work for a mahoosive payrise like the last government did.

When I was teaching the pupils who went on to be doctors were the cleverest, nicest, most hardworking of the bunch. I have no hesitation in saying that they (and their strong arm union, the BMA) will run rings round the government.

And, no, they shouldn't be striking. If the Tube workers strike London merely grinds to a halt. If the doctors strike, people die.

And, of course, what is often not mentioned when people bemoan the fact that:
a) doctors leave the UK to work abroad and/or
b) the NHS is being privatised by the Tories

is that they go overseas to work where there is no NHS and they are working privately.

Extra support staff, ie nurses, X-ray and laboratory staff, etc would be needed to provide diagnostic tests often necessary. Not to mention administration staff. Is it realistic to expect the doctors to work without the normal support services available during the week. Even with the increased NHS funding announced today I cannot believe it would cover all the extra costs involved. If the NHS want more doctors to work to cover 7 days a week then they must provide the extra support services too. Perhaps this call on doctors to work at weekends is just the beginning and the other services will be told to work the same hours as well.

Teacher11, a review of mortality rates when doctors strike showed that fewer people died; something else that Hunt got wrong.
The link is at the top of this page if you want to look at it.

Osborne has shaken the magic money tree, for the NHS and the forces.
We'll find out tomorrow who pays for it.

Perhaps the police forces will have to dig into the reserves they are sitting on to pay for the type of policemen who look after the public and not waste the money on their top people

Two billion sounds a lot, but when you think about the amount they will have to pay in redundancy, it does not go far.
It was said that the number of police in Paris last week equalled the number of police in the UK. We need more police, not less, in case of attacks, I would have thought. Isn't it Theresa May who is cutting the size of the police force?