Support your Junior Doctors, an Open Letter to MP's in the South West

Katrinaspinney
Authored by Katrinaspinney
Posted Monday, October 19, 2015 - 10:32am

Open Letter to all MP’s in the South West.

I am writing to you to express my despair at the proposed changes to the current contract for junior doctors in England. I am afraid that this is an emotional letter rather than one filled with statistics as I am writing this on my first day home alone with my 13 day old baby girl, I hope that fact shows you how important this issue it to me.

My husband is a junior doctor training in anaesthetics and working at the R D and E, he is back at work today in intensive care on a 13 hour shift. He will be a “junior” doctor until he is 37. We both accept that his job comes with long and antisocial hours, it is what he signed up for. He also spends a large amount of his free time revising for compulsory exams, reading journals, teaching, running audits and managing work emails as he does not have time to do these things when he is at work. His job involves inserting needles into people’s spines and injecting them with drugs to stop them breathing so he can put a tube down their throat and keeping them alive through operations. This is a lot of responsibility and these are your constituents that he is taking care of.

To get to where he is today he has completed a first class physics degree, a four year fast track medical degree then worked for two years as a foundation doctor before specialising in anaesthetics and completed two years of core anaesthetics training before starting this, his first specialist year. He still has four years’ worth of training and two very expensive (about £700) exams to complete before he can qualify and apply for a consultant post. We moved to Devon at the beginning of this year from North Wales so he could continue with his training and I had to leave my job. I do not understand why the integrity and dedication of junior doctors is being questioned by the Health Secretary and it seems contrary to even Conservative values that someone who has worked so hard and devoted so much time to educating themselves is now being offered a 30% pay cut and worse working conditions.

I feel personally insulted by the reclassification of antisocial hours as this is telling me that my time with him is worthless and it devalues the importance of a family life. As I am sure you are aware, MP’s have just voted to make Commons more “family friendly” to encourage more MP’s, whilst at the same time this change to the contract for doctors does the opposite. My husband already works frankly horrible shift patterns, for example Monday to Thursday 8:00-17:30 followed by Friday- Sunday 8:30-21:30 with only Monday off before he begins again. But we accept this and his pay respects that this is not a sociable working pattern. With the removal of banding, all of his time apart from Sunday will be “social”. Working at 21:00 on a Saturday is not social. At the moment it is just me that suffers, especially when I was working 9-5 full time, but in the future it will be our child too who will not see her father all weekend. A removal of financial penalties to trusts for doctors working these hours will result in more of them, especially when they cannot recruit enough trainees to fill the rota. This will also make it harder for me to return to work and arrange childcare.

I have also unfortunately been a patient recently as things did not go to plan when I had my baby and I was on the receiving end of help around the clock from trainee anaesthetists, obstetricians and neonatal doctors (along with many midwives, auxiliaries and nurses). The registrar paediatrician who took care of my baby was herself heavily pregnant and she told me her ward round makes her sad because she is always making people cry. This new contract that is being imposed will penalise her too and anyone else that wants to raise a family, this means you will lose fantastic people like her with years of training (and therefore investment) if this contract change goes ahead. Clearly the importance of a family life and flexible working is understood by MP’s judging by the vote.

This is about more than just my small family, it will tear the NHS apart. So much rides on the goodwill and compassion of its staff members. I often worry that my husband has been knocked off his bike on the way home when it is 22:40 and I haven’t heard from him, but normally it is because he has stayed late to help, not for more pay, just because it is the right thing to do. Last month in intensive care a family only arrived at handover and he stayed to talk to them and give them some time with their relative before he turned the life support off because he didn’t feel it was right to pass the case on to the start of the next shift and someone that hadn’t treated their relative. Patients deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, but so do the people who are treating them.

When I left the labour ward to go to theatre to have my baby delivered my midwife had to change shifts and collect her son from school, but she went home, dropped him off and came back just to check I was ok.
People don’t work in the health service for the money, it’s because they care, but this does not mean they should not be valued. These changes will affect everyone and I am concerned that this contract is setting up junior doctors to fail by demoralising then overworking and under valuing them. All these people have dedicated their lives to medicine, I have seen first-hand that it is impossible to become a doctor without doing so.

These changes will impact on your constituents. This part of England has an aging population and needs doctors to care for their increasingly complex needs. Wales and Scotland are not imposing these changes and you will find that posts become harder to fill, especially in the fields (anaesthesia, obstetrics, emergency) that the changes to antisocial hours impact most. This might seem just an issue to those who will be directly affected by the salary cut my husband is facing, but it isn’t, this will affect absolutely everyone if you can’t recruit enough trainees.

How do I explain to my daughter that her father is giving most of his life saving the lives of others and that I’m immensely proud of him, but would not encourage her to do the same thing? I do not want her to grow up in a country where the health system is based on greed and care is apportioned by the ability to pay rather than greatest need, especially, as by definition those in greatest need are likely to be least able to pay.

I urge you to support junior doctors and reject these changes for the sake of all your constituents.

I apologise for the length and somewhat disorganised nature of this letter, it is hard to concentrate when you have a very small demanding baby to look after at the same time.

Regards,

Katrina Spinney

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