Union leader Walter Reuther’s reply to early automation | Brief letters

The UK government now says that due to the election all e-petitions will be closed, though people can still read them. Petitions will have to be restarted after the election and signatures cannot be transferred. What a terrible way to treat the public. Some of these petitions have already reached the target of 100,000 and were due to be discussed, such as “Drivers over the age of 70 having to be tested every three years”. We should insist the new petitions committee ensures that the popular ones are discussed and do not have to start again.
Ann Paterson
Didcot, Oxfordshire

• Like Andrew Mayers’ brother (Opinion, 25 April) I had electroconvulsive therapy in 2006 after three years of “treatment-resistant” depression and it gave me my life back with minimal side-effects. When I had a relapse last year, the NHS psychiatrist had no hesitation in prescribing it again and I was completely well within a few weeks. It saddens me to think that Andrew’s brother was not offered that option. Surely the NHS should not hesitate to offer ECT immediately to anyone who has benefited from it in the past.
Ian Arnott
Peterborough, Cambridgeshire

• After years of hard training, Ellie Downie wins the Gymnastic European Championships. The Guardian honours her with the smallest article in the sports section (22 April). Perhaps she and all the other girl gymnasts should have been wearing high heels to work to get more recognition (Ministers accused of cop-out over refusal to outlaw rules on high heels, same edition).
John Wilson (former gymnast and coach)
Long Melford, Suffolk

• Regarding the rise of the robots putting jobs at risk (Report, 15 April and Letters, 25 April), Walter Reuther, the US union leader after the war, was shown around a Ford plant in Cleveland in 1954. A Ford official pointed to some automatically controlled machines and asked Reuther: “How are you going to collect union dues from these guys?” Reuther replied: “How are you going to get them to buy Fords?”.
John Richards
Oxford

• I can’t cope with any more bad news; first Brexit, then Trump and now Bananarama to make a comeback (G2, 24 April).
Ken Balkow
Sheffield

• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters

Union leader Walter Reuther’s reply to early automation | Brief letters

Junior doctors may desert NHS over contract, says union boss

The junior doctor at the heart of an escalating row over NHS strike action has warned that the imposition of a new contract could lead to a collapse in morale and an exodus of staff.

Ellen McCourt, chair of the British Medical Association’s junior doctors committee, said that the health service, which faces the looming prospect of Brexit and an ageing population, was already “chronically understaffed” and that the proposed changes risked pushing the service to breaking point.

“The biggest risk with this contract, and also with this dispute continuing, is that doctors will leave the NHS,” said McCourt. “You can’t stretch us more thinly. There needs to be a plan – how are we going to make medicine more attractive to people? How are we going to make people stay in the NHS?”

The BMA announced on Wednesday that it would begin an unprecedented five-day walkout by junior doctors later this month, with further five-day strikes proposed for each month in the run-up to Christmas. Earlier this summer, 58% of doctors rejected a compromise contract deal backed by the then BMA junior doctor leader, Johann Malawana. He has since resigned and been replaced by McCourt.

The strike announcement has divided the medical community, provoking criticism from Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, which brings together doctors’ professional bodies. Many within the BMA are also concerned about the impact the action will have on patients and there have reportedly been ferocious exchanges at meetings where the proposed action was discussed.

McCourt said the greatest risk was that doctors, whose morale is at “rock bottom”, will no longer want to work in the UK if NHS resources are stretched still further. The new contract is designed to make it cheaper to rota more doctors in at weekends.

“I have some colleagues who took time out to work in New Zealand between their first two years of training and their speciality training, and they came back to the UK because they’d always planned on coming back to the UK,” she said. “Now they plan on leaving again. One is a general practice trainee and one is an emergency medicine trainee – our most under-recruited specialities.”

Last year, General Medical Council figures showed newly qualified doctors formed a growing proportion of the thousands of British medics seeking jobs abroad each year. This summer the Institute of Public Policy Research thinktank warned about the threat Brexit would pose to the NHS, stating that the health service would collapse if it were to lose its 57,000 workers who are EU nationals.

The increased number of places for prestigious medical courses offered this summer through university clearing – traditionally the bargain basement for degree places – could be a worrying sign of what may be to come, she said.

Ellen McCourt: ‘You can’t stretch us more thinly. There needs to be a plan.’ Photograph: Sarah Turton/BMA

McCourt added that the strikes could have been avoided, but that when she wrote to the health secretary a month ago outlining the reasons why junior doctors had rejected the new contract, she was ignored. “When he imposed the contract, he said in parliament: ‘My door is always open, I want to be able to address any outstanding problems’, so I took him at his word.”

Health Education England and NHS Employers, who were also addressed in the letter, responded to the points raised – which included concerns relating to part-time workers – but Hunt did not, said McCourt. “I tried two weeks ago to get back in touch with the secretary of state to ask why haven’t we heard anything back and I could only get in touch with his special advisers; I couldn’t get in touch with him. And when we [met] on Tuesday it was very different – it was: ‘Well, you’re proposing industrial action so we haven’t responded’.

“If we’d seen some response or some movement then we could have said, well, the government do want to talk to us, they are willing to make changes without us again resorting to industrial action.”

A Department of Health spokesperson said: “It’s unfair to suggest we haven’t responded to this letter – we resolved two of the issues the BMA raised and gave them a clear timeline of when we would respond on the final two pay-related issues. Despite this, the BMA didn’t wait and announced industrial action. As doctors’ representatives, the BMA should be putting patients first, not playing politics in a way that will be immensely damaging for vulnerable patients.”

The BMA argues the new contract, which is being phased in from the autumn, unfairly affects those who work less than full time, many of whom are women. It also says the terms are damaging to doctors who work the most weekends, which typically includes those who are in areas such as A&E, where there are already staff shortages.

“This contract financially disincentivises less-than-full-time trainees – carers, parents, who are predominately women, in a workforce that is predominantly women,” said McCourt. “It will cost some women more money to go to work than to stay at home.”

McCourt, who has become the focus of press attention following the strike announcement, said that the drastic action was being taken as a last resort. “I would much rather be in a room with the government getting this sorted out than having to make the plans that we’re being forced to make, hearing that the press are hounding my family. I would much rather be talking with the government, with NHS employers to try and get an resolution to this.”

Junior doctors may desert NHS over contract, says union boss

District nurses will disappear by 2025, says union

‘The decline in district nursing has occurred even though the demand for their solutions has increased.’ Photograph: Bubbles Photolibrary/Alamy

District nurses, a cornerstone of NHS care, are disappearing so quickly that by 2025 they will “face extinction”, the Royal University of Nursing warns in a report published on Tuesday.

Official figures present that numbers functioning in the NHS in England have nearly halved, from 12,620 in 2003 to 6,656 last 12 months, a 47% drop in a decade. That fall is so significant that they are now a “critically endangered” kind of health expert, the nurses’ union claims.

District nurses go to individuals at house to give chemotherapy to individuals with cancer, make certain diabetics get normal doses of insulin and support the dying finish their days as painlessly as achievable. They can visit patients many occasions a day if necessary, and aid maintain individuals out of hospital unnecessarily.

However the decline in district nursing has occurred even although the demand for their services has enhanced – due to the fact of the ageing population, a increasing number of men and women with life style-connected conditions this kind of as sort 2 diabetes, stress on hospital beds and a drive to provide much more solutions outside hospital.

District nursing teams are hampered by employees shortages which will worsen in the following few many years as numerous – 35% of district nurses are in excess of 50 – reach retirement.

District nurses are typically under such pressure that 75% say they leave at the end of residence visits without possessing undertaken some required tasks, such as providing the patient with a complete explanation of their problem or therapy, or answering all their queries, including their prospects for recovery, or completely assessing their psychological wellness.

Though they have carried out important health care duties, such as administering drugs and checking dressings, they are frustrated by lack of time. The same constraints also restrict their time to speak to a patient’s GP or social staff, in accordance to research among 2,438 neighborhood-primarily based nurses in England carried out for the RCN by the national nursing research unit at King’s School London and Employment Research Restricted.

The survey also discovered that just 37% of district nurses’ time is spent on direct patient care travelling (12%), administration (19%) and evaluation, care organizing and co-ordination (20%) consider up a lot of their week, too, respondents stated.

“The district nurse position is the basis of a technique which must be able to manage circumstances and preserve sick and frail individuals at house. Eliminate individuals foundations and the complete edifice could come crashing down,” warned Dr Peter Carter, the chief executive of the school.

By 2025 there will be several thousands of families with frail, elderly family members, who could nicely have survived a quantity of illnesses. But when they appear for aid to control at house, it basically won’t be there, he warned.

The union would like the NHS to commit to doubling numbers, to get back to the degree noticed a decade ago, in buy to meet the growing demand and offer higher-top quality care.

The Division of Overall health agreed that far more local community-primarily based nurses were essential. Even though Robert Francis’s report into the Mid Staffs scandal had led to hospitals using much more nurses in latest months, “we now require to make confident this transpires across the NHS and in the neighborhood”, a spokesman explained.

“Which is why the chief nursing officer has set up a doing work group which is hunting specifically at what we can do to boost the variety of neighborhood nurses and we are committed to education ten,000 more frontline local community workers by 2020.”

The college’s yearly congress in Liverpool debated calls from some nurses for drunk individuals to be taken care of someplace other than A&ampE units due to the fact they can be disruptive and suggest personnel have significantly less time to commit with other patients.

Some components of the NHS have experimented with alcohol recovery centres, “drunk tanks” and “booze buses” to maintain inebriated folks away from hospitals.

But Carter said that, although he supported pilot tasks to assess the viability of such schemes, the risk of a drunk patient dying as a result of having the head injury they had suffered in a fall being misdiagnosed and want to give them proper diagnostic tests meant that the scope for diverting drunks might effectively show to be limited.

“When somebody is inebriated, just pondering ‘They’re drunk let’s place them in a bus or something’, the problem with that is that if they have fallen in excess of and got a subdural haematoma or some other issue, they could die”, he said.

District nurses will disappear by 2025, says union

Nursing union welcome new suggestions

Getting hospital nurses care for a lot more than eight patients every for the duration of the day generates an “improved chance of harm”, an NHS watchdog has warned.

The Nationwide Institute for Overall health and Care Excellence (Good) has drawn up draft recommendations to deal with ranges of nursing employees following the Francis Inquiry into the catastrophic care failings at Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust.

The watchdog explained there is more threat of harm if there is a decrease ratio of nurses to individuals, but stopped quick of stipulating 1 to eight was an absolute minimum, stating flexibility was necessary on a day-to-day basis.

Dr Peter Carter from the Royal School of Nursing has welcomed guidelines advising that nurses must not have to appear soon after much more than eight individuals, but has also warned that in some units, nurses must only be seeking after one or two people at a time.

Dr Peter Carter, chief executive of the Royal University of Nursing (RCN), mentioned: “We are encouraged that these suggestions have been developed – following substantial and steady evidence from the RCN of the danger to patients exactly where there are too couple of workers.

“They underline what we presently know – that a registered nurse caring for a lot more than eight individuals under these conditions is a result in for concern – in several cases, substantially far more nurses will be necessary.

Nursing union welcome new suggestions

Australian wellness amenities at risk from international trade deal, says union

The trade union representing Australia’s nurses and midwives is warning that a worldwide trade deal in solutions might herald a new wave of privatisations in the country’s public hospitals and health services.

The New South Wales Nurses and Midwives’ Association has written to the federal trade minister, Andrew Robb, requesting that details of the Trade in Providers Agreement (Tisa) be made public to handle issues from a variety of groups that the proposed pact will have a profound impact on the provision of public providers.

Negotiations on the Tisa resume in Geneva on Monday and Australia is chairing the talks from then until Friday.

The 23 parties to the agreement are Australia, Canada, Chile, Chinese Taipei, Colombia, Costa Rica, the European Union (representing its 28 member states), Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Liechtenstein, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the Republic of Korea, Switzerland, Turkey and the United States.

Talks on the agreement began last year, and Australia is moving the deal forward with the US and the EU. The pact is getting pursued outside the World Trade Organisation by a group of pro-trade liberalisation nations with the notion that the final text be compatible with the Standard Agreement on Trade in Providers (Gat).

Australia has a significant economic curiosity in liberalising the international trade in solutions. The solutions sector comprises about 70% of domestic economic activity and 17% of exports, in accordance to evaluation by the Division of Foreign Affairs and Tade.

But unions representing public sector employees internationally are getting ready to campaign towards the agreement.

Public Providers International, the global physique for public sector unions, has commissioned a report that attacks the foundations of the proposed pact. That report, released at the Australian embassy in Geneva on Monday, contends that the Tisa is “among the alarming new wave of trade and investment agreements founded on legally binding powers that institutionalise the rights of traders and prohibit government actions in a broad selection of regions only incidentally related to trade”.

It claims the agreement will avert governments from returning public services to public hands when privatisations fail, will restrict domestic rules on employee security, will restrict environmental laws and will impact client protections and regulatory authority in places such as licensing of healthcare services, electrical power plants, waste disposal and university and school accreditation.

The PSI has known as on the negotiating parties to release the provisional text, exclude all public services from the agreement and guarantee that all nations have the correct to regulate in the public curiosity.

The New South Wales nurses have also written to Robb seeking clarification about Australia’s stance in the discussions. The union’s general secretary, Brett Holmes, claims the Tisa “would make it less difficult for multinational firms to revenue with impunity”.

“If profitable it could open up a wide selection of crucial public solutions, such as wellness care, to be offered off permanently for personal revenue and never permitted to be returned to public hands,” Holmes mentioned. “Every new wellness-care support would also have to be privatised beneath this agreement.”

The feedback echo arguments the ACTU has put to the government as part of the public submissions procedure into the proposed agreement.

But the Tisa also has powerful supporters in the organization community, each in Australia and internationally. The Australian Companies Roundtable has utilized its submission to the foreign affairs department to get in touch with for a pact with a “high degree of ambition”.

“Now that the Tisa negotiations have begun, it is crucially important to sustain momentum and retain a substantial degree of ambition,” the group says.

“We think that an ambitious agreement must cover 21st century troubles, like cross-border data flows, regulatory transparency and co-operation, movement of organization individuals and principles for state-owned and state-sponsored enterprises that compete in business markets and the digital economic system.”

One more supporter is the ANZ Financial institution. Its submission says the bank “strongly supports the Tisa negotiations and believes they signify a considerable opportunity not only for lowering barriers to trade for recent parties to the negotiations, but can also set important targets for additional liberalisation in the long term by nations at the moment not a get together to the negotiation”.

Australian wellness amenities at risk from international trade deal, says union