Doctor who berated Jeremy Hunt says he could quit NHS
|
Version 0 of 1. The junior doctor who confronted Jeremy Hunt on camera about his decision to impose a new contract on medics has said he and his wife will have to seriously consider their careers in the NHS if the new terms are forced through. Dr Dagan Lonsdale followed the health secretary into the studios at Millbank in central London, to berate him about his decision. “You’ve got no evidence whatsoever Mr Hunt that these changes will have a positive effect. You are taking a massive gamble with people in the NHS. I don’t know why you won’t address that point,” he said. Lonsdale, a registrar working in intensive care and clinical pharmacology at St George’s hospital in south London, had been interviewed in the TV studios himself just before Hunt arrived. He told the Guardian he had been pleased to have the chance to ambush the health secretary, because he so rarely saw him agree to talk directly to junior doctors. “He promised to meet me later,” he said. “I’m sure he doesn’t mean it, but I’ll be trying to take him up on it. He did say we can meet later. He doesn’t want to sit down with an intelligent, informed professional who knows the facts. “Mr Hunt has always said his door is open for us to talk, but today he slammed it shut in my face.” The specialist registrar said he had been particularly angered by Hunt’s statement on weekend death rates. “He mentioned eight separate studies, but they are all based on the same dataset, and two of them were by the same person. It is completely untrue that they are separate and independent studies,” he said. Lonsdale said he and his wife would now have to sit down and work out if they could continue in their professions. “We have to contemplate if we can work in a system that stretches doctors in such a way that patients are put at risk and where we will be unable to give the right amount of time to family life for our son,” he said. Departing doctors would mean a new crisis for the NHS, on top of the recruitment crisis it already faces. “I think if even 1% of the NHS workforce leaves because of this contract, the NHS will be in dire straits,” he said. “There are already gaps in rotas across the country. A&E already has missing shifts. The only option if you want a fully seven-day NHS service without any more investment is to stretch services thinner or make doctors work more hours and we all know tired doctors make mistakes.” Lonsdale said it was for the BMA to decide on the next course of action. “I can tell you that 53,000 junior doctors are not going to allow the imposition of the contract that is unsafe for patients. “All we can hope for is that David Cameron will see the anger on this, and say, hang on a minute, we better take a step back.”Lonsdale and Hunt have clashed before, during an interview for BBC Radio 4’s Today programme last year. The registrar said he believed that interview was the last time the health secretary had taken part in a live exchange with a junior doctor, after he confronted Hunt about his claims that doctors did not fully understand the deal being offered. “It’s a bad idea to tell doctors they are being misled by their union because they’re well and able to make an assessment themselves,” he told the health secretary on the programme. Lonsdale later claimed Hunt had complained after the programme that he had not expected to be confronted on-air by a junior doctor. |