Guarding patients and trying to keep Britain healthy | Letters

Junior medical professionals are not ready to accept changes to their contracts that would negatively affect patient care and doctors’ safety. In July, the overall health secretary attacked doctors’ professionalism and dedication to sufferers in a deliberate mischaracterisation of the care they and other NHS staff deliver to sufferers each and every day and night of the week. At the same time he gave physicians just eight weeks to agree to new negotiations on a potential new contract for junior physicians (Hospital consultants encounter ultimatum, sixteen July). It has rapidly turn into clear that the so-referred to as negotiations on contracts for junior medical doctors offered by Jeremy Hunt do absolutely nothing to deal with our worries and are rather an imposition in all but title. It is for this explanation that junior doctors have rejected the United kingdom government’s offer to re-enter negotiations.

By merely going along with a government hell-bent on receiving something signed, sealed and delivered as swiftly as possible, we would be letting down junior doctors and the patients for whom they care.

The British Health-related Association is clear that what the government is proposing for junior physicians is unacceptable. To get the BMA back around the table it is important that the government reverses its position on extending regimen doing work hours from 60 hrs a week to 90 removing essential safeguards that discourage employers from producing junior medical professionals function dangerously lengthy hrs making modifications to spend so that it no longer matches the experience junior medical professionals acquire via their training.

Junior medical doctors are not prepared to agree contract alterations that would threat patient security and doctors’ wellbeing. This has been our position all along and – in the absence of any try by the government to handle our considerations – remains our place right now.

It is time the government puts an end to the attacks on doctors’ professionalism, reverses its hardline stance and performs with junior physicians in a real negotiation for a contract that is excellent for patients, medical doctors and the NHS.
Dr Andrew Collier and Dr Kitty Mohan
BMA junior medical professional committee co-chairs, British Health care Association

• Your editorial (17 August) is proper to highlight that George Osborne’s austerity agenda is the most critical concern dealing with the NHS. Although he has agreed to ringfence the NHS price range, this nevertheless equates to cutting back, because healthcare inflation runs at three-four% a yr due to rising demand, escalating population and pricey new healthcare technologies. To make up that 3-four% gap the NHS was asked to make “efficiency savings” of £20bn in between 2009 and 2014, acknowledged as the “Nicholson” challenge. This has not only resulted in a crisis in A&ampE and general practice, and a steep boost in cancelled operations, it has really resulted in a fall in NHS productivity (according to the chief economist of the Wellness Foundation) primarily due to the costs of recruiting agency staff (£2.5bn a year) needed to keep the services operating right after so several long lasting employees had been laid off or not replaced. But, despite the worsening crisis, Osborne is inflicting the same prescription at an even increased dose of £22bn of savings by 2020. Coupled with cuts to public wellness price range and nearby social companies, there is no way the NHS can sustain secure and powerful complete solutions. This is why there has been this kind of outrage over Jeremy Hunt’s strategies for a “seven-day NHS”. The calls for charging, co-payment and different funding versions are previously coming from the appropriate. Anticipate individuals calls to get louder and much more regular as the winter kicks in.
Dr Clive Peedell
Co-leader of the National Overall health Action Celebration, Consultant clinical oncologist

• The Nationwide Institute for Wellness and Care Excellence (Good) blames physicians and sufferers for the overuse of antibiotics but the dilemma goes much deeper (Resist patient strain on antibiotics, GPs urged, 18 August). As a patient I’ve been prescribed 11 antibiotics in the last 9 years. 1 of them saved my lifestyle, two permitted me to have an operation, but the other people did me more harm than good.

Due to the fact I know about the problems, obtaining researched and written about them for a lot of many years as they relate to antibiotic overuse in farming, I’ve asked my physician each time if they had been truly required.

The dilemma, I feel, is two-fold. Healthcare and veterinary schools teach tiny but drug-based medication and, as a result, medical professionals and vets have small to offer except antibiotics. And in the pursuit of ever-less expensive milk, meat and eggs, intensive farmers are driven by economics to use antibiotics to enhance productivity.

So place some of the blame on the universities and some on the government, which is hand in glove with the drug businesses that want to sell as many antibiotics as they can. But at a more instant level, why doesn’t Great prepare a selection of leaflets for non-urgent circumstances, which physicians could hand to sufferers alternatively of prescriptions? I’ve discovered the challenging way that there are typically better options and also that pharmacists are typically greater at giving good advice than doctors.
Richard Younger
Policy director, Sustainable Food Believe in

• The announcement by Diabetes Uk that an enhance in the number of diabetes cases threatens to bankrupt the NHS (Report, theguardian.com, 17 August) has reignited discussions about a sugar tax. Remembering that 90% of diabetes circumstances in the United kingdom are variety 2, this could be worth pursuing, but there is a much more basic cause from which most of the danger variables emerge, which is not being talked about.

That is our relentless complete-time work culture, which sees numerous of us sitting at desks for eight hrs a day, 5 days a week, if not a lot more, bookended of program by a sit-down commute morning and evening. This operate culture, which is so typical to us that it looks almost ordained is in truth really unnatural and is the explanation that numerous of us are rest-deprived, don’t consume well and lack physical exercise – 3 recognized causes of sort two diabetes. It is difficult, though, for any a single individual to drop out of the dominant function culture, particularly if they have family responsibilities. Both one drops out and is underemployed, or gets utilized to an expanding waistline.

It doesn’t have to be this way. A shorter working week, shorter operating days and much more function flexibility would allow us much more time to pursue lively hobbies and leave us less tired. This would go a extended way in the direction of reducing the quantity of individuals who produce diabetes and would almost certainly do a good deal for stopping cancer and heart illness too. It is all well and good for the government to inform us to exercising more and consume healthily, but at the exact same time, it encourages an ethos of long and difficult work. For our own well being, as scandalous as it sounds, we want to work significantly less.
Angela Dennis
London

Guarding patients and trying to keep Britain healthy | Letters