FIRST OF ALL: Stop fucking calling everyone a junior doctor! They’re fucking NCHDs and many of them have been working as doctors for more than 5 years. “Junior” is used to demean and minimize the work they do. But at 3 in the morning on a Sunday, the “junior” doctor is the one that’s going to treat that RTA in the ED and resuscitate your ailing uncle and take that perforated bowel to theater and save lives. There is nothing junior about them.
SECOND: This new contract is a threat to patient safety and doctor safety. It’s not about money. It’s SO NOT about money. The politicians want to make it about money because then all these doctors are made out to be money grubbing careless fecks. And they are not! Let me tell you about pay. We make shit all money. And we take that shit all and turn it into leases for the every 6-12 months we move house and uproot our families; we turn it into fees for our colleges, for our medical certification, for our exams and courses, all of which are required to continue to be doctors; we turn it into take away and child-minder fees and transportation costs; we turn it into loan repayments. That is what we do with the pay, and in the spare day we get once a month, we might have the cash left over to go to the cinema. That’s what we do with the pay we get. But let me explain WHY this isn’t about the money. We are not asking to get paid more. We are not asking to get better benefits, to have every weekend off, to work 9-5 and leave EVERYTHING in the office. That isn’t what we are about. This new contract removes the brakes on a system tilting into untenable work hours and unsafe practice. You think it’s bad if your doctor has been up for 16 hours working, wait until they’ve been working for 36 hours and will grab 6 hours sleep and come back in and do it again. For the past decade, doctors have been asked to work harder, to do more, and to do it with less staff (of all levels - nurses, midwives, social workers, OT and physio... ALL of the medical support fields are being battered by this rubbish), with less money, with less resources, and to do it in less time. Something is going to give. And you know what’s happened in Ireland? You know what’s finally given? The doctors. They’ve left. It’s too stressful. You can know what a patient needs, how to treat, be the best medical mind, but if it isn’t sourced in a restricted system, your hands are tied.
If you want to know what this contract will do, look at Ireland. Look at the state of the HSE, of the DFB, of the INMO and IMO, of the NCHDs in Ireland (whom, in a survey, 90% of Irish med students plan to emigrate), of the GPs that are spread SO thin on the ground that it might take a week to get in to see your doctor and damn if they aren’t as pissed off about it as you are, but they’re seeing 45 patients a day and trying to do house calls and look after the nursing home down the road. Look at the court battles and strike action here. Look at the frustration of a single person working on the front lines. Come talk to me after I work a week in the ED from 5pm-1am and turn around to start a week at 10pm-8am (and when I say week, I do mean 7 days)... Talk to me about how doctors are greedy and lazy and don’t care about patients. I warn you, I’m equally likely to cry as I am to punch you depending on how many hours of my shift was spent in resus trying to keep a baby alive that night.
We see you on the worst days of your life. We get pissed on, vomited on, spat on, shat on, and yelled at. And we turn around and do it again, because that is our job, our vocation. When the entire nation’s worth of doctors drop tools, step back, and put their hands up and say No. This is too much. You need to listen. Because it is 100% breaking our hearts to do it. Yes, a strike endangers lives. But less so than this new contract would. And we’ve looked down the line and said, no. This is it. This is the limit. If we don’t dig in here the cost will be too great.
And to the BBC who cannot understand why the doctors “Think it’s ok” to go on strike... Consider the way you’ve framed this. If this is just a job, then we are entitled to industrial action. If this is a vocation, a duty, and ethical obligation, then we are acting along those lines.
