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| STRIKE ACTION |
Tens of thousands of junior doctors across
England have gone on strike Tuesday over government plans to change their work
contracts in a way that medics claim will leave them worse off.
The action, the first such for over 40 years, is
the latest twist in a chronic financing crisis at the state-funded National
Health Service, and comes after weeks of increasingly bitter recriminations
between the doctors and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt.
Across much of England, patients received only
emergency care, while planned over 3,500 operations and many more consultations
were postponed. It’s the first of the first of three planned days of strike
action. The BBC reported that over a third of the doctors involved had reported
for work as normal, but that’s because they were due to perform the pared-down
emergency services, rather than because they were strike-breaking.
Junior doctors (a phrase that covers those who
have just graduated from med school to those with as much
as 10 years of
experience in practise) routinely work 100 hours a week due to staff shortages,
according to the British Medical Association, on starting salaries of as little
as $36,000. Their working conditions are regularly paraded as proof of how it
has become impossible to square the commitment to a universal, taxpayer-funded
health-care system with the finite resources at government’s disposal. Britain
spends less per capita on health than most advanced nations, but the bill for
the NHS in England alone still comes to over £106 billion ($154 billion) this
year – over 9% of GDP.
Given
the acuteness and breadth of the systemic crisis facing the NHS, the direct
cause of today’s strike is bizarrely arcane. It revolves around government
plans for a new contract that would raise basic pay by 11%, but reduce the
number of evening and weekend hours that qualify as “antisocial”, and thus
subject to top-up payments (the top-up rates themselves are also being cut to a
maximum of 150% of the basic rate, from 200% at present). In essence, it boils
down to an attempt to make Saturday count as a regular weekday, consistent with
the government’s efforts to make more NHS services, such as consultations and
scheduled operations, available at weekends.
The new contract will also scrap guaranteed pay
increases linked to time in the job, replacing them with a new scale linked to
the completion of certain training stages. The future of the NHS has become the
most reliably divisive issue in British politics over the last decades, with
Conservative governments tending towards reining in constantly rising costs,
and Labour governments prioritizing service levels, even at the cost of much
wider budget deficits.
SOURCE: FORTUNE MAGAZINE
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