WHAT AN UTTERLY HORRIBLE MESS !

Today I am depressed and sad &  I write this with a very heavy heart
I have resisted the urge to write or do anything about the Junior doctors' dispute apart from showing my support for the juniors in our department.
But after today's developments, I just cannot hold back any further.
The poor Syrian people and junior doctors in England have alot in common  -  let down by everyone around them,
a health secretary who is obsessed with a single issue and who seems to have lost the plot completely,
a trade union that since the days of Tony Blair has tried to convince everyone that the NHS is about to be sold off to big bad American Corporations and that this dispute is about privatisation and saving the NHS,
a trade union that has continued to argue for huge increases in the number of doctors paid at a premium rate at a time when the the country is indebted to the hilt
by Health Education England and their predecessors for not  developing the role of Physicians/Surgeons Assistants  or whatever they're called nowadays,  as a separate profession for school leavers (rather than raiding depleted stock of nurses and other healthcare workers).
By educationalists and royal colleges who insisted on removal of the apprenticeship model and  developing and formalising training for junior doctors ( a good thing in itself) without insisting on a decrease in the huge amount of service they were still providing  -
by senior healthcare managers and public health doctors who continue to argue for fewer hospital beds and seem to missed the fact that the population is ageing fast and that these elderly people require both increased social and healthcare services resulting in a unbearable burden that seems to fallen on, amongst others the shoulders of junior doctors,

and I could go on and on.
Something had to give and I fear we are all about to pay a very high price.

PS I gave a talk to 6th formers last week and the ones who plan to do medicine are applying to Scottish and Welsh medical schools because of the doctors' dispute.

I was speaking with junior German doctors last night and their jaws dropped when I told them that the UK government wanted to classify Saturday as a normal working day for doctors in training in England. 

Will Revalidation be Victimless?

Jumping through the hated hoops to revalidate
Since December 2012, in addition to being on the medical register of the General Medical Council, all doctors in the UK have to have a Licence to Practice. This has to be renewed every 5 years and this renewal will require an annual strengthened appraisal.
 I read quite recently that several thousand doctors who were expected to have had an appraisal by now still had not.
I am an appraiser as well as having to be an appraisee. I still find the whole process of collecting and collating supporting information, organising an appraisal together with the additional steps one has to take every revalidation cycle to be quite burdensome.
We are all very busy and many doctors are quite disorganised when it comes to organising things that do not relate directly to patient care.
How many of us for example have taken every day of leave owed to us?
How many of us have claimed every mile driving to and from clinics or MDTs?
This article in BMA news is an account (the first of many I suspect) that  not learning the art of box ticking and suffering bouts of procrastination could now prove to be seriously painful indeed for many doctors.
Will it all be worthwhile ? Are patients now less likely to be harmed by the medical profession? Probably not! It may still all be worth it  if we all end up organising ourselves, claiming every penny and every day's holiday owed to us and setting clinical work aside to find the necessary 7 or so hours to get appraised.
Aaah, I can see now why we need 7 day working!!

Why are the BMA so bloody naive! #doctors'strike

Doctors in the UK have been balloted and on June 21st they will strike. There was a surprising (to me initially anyway) overwhelming majority for industrial action.
On second thoughts, maybe the results were not so surprising - the passing of the NHS and social care bill has radicalized many doctors and as much as the BMA might deny it, this radicalism has had an impact on the result of the pension ballot. There are many doctors, like myself, who are against taking industrial action and most I suspect, just did not bother to vote. This reluctance to vote has had the effect of making the majority of doctors appear militant.  Amazingly enough, the redoubtable Victoria Coren, a non medic tried to rationalize the reason for striking, in a very public place. 
Nonetheless, even if most of the work will be done on the day, the damage to the reputation and general good standing of doctors in the eye of the public is already done and will be long lasting. Phil Hammond is right to state that Andrew Lansley is smiling today.  You can guarantee that a child somewhere, who won't be seen on June 21st will become very ill and the Daily Mail will hear about it.

Wanting your CEA Cake and eating it.

Consultant frustration grows over CEA limbo » Hospital Dr

Currently, there are many reasons why doctors in the UK (& I mean the UK, not just England) are unhappy - pensions, pay freeze, CEAs freeze and of course in England, the Health and social Care Bill. With this last issue, doctors' Trade unions and professional bodies i.e. Royal Colleges (well most of them anyway - I personally am very pleased with the stance the English College of surgeons have taken) have pitted themselves against the government and have made the lives of Andrew Lansley, the Prime Minister and the whole government very difficult. What is lacking from many of these bodies, in particular the British medical association is pragmatism or real politik. Their intransigent position, in my humble opinion , completely undermines their positions on CEAs and pensions. Do they really think that the big beast of government will listen to them pleading for more money at the same time as they are kicking the s**t out of its shins?
As Harry Hill would say ' I quite like being a rebel but I also quite like brownies, there's only one way to find out - FIGHT.'