Doctors prepare to take Jeremy Hunt to court in crowd-funded fight against harmful contracts
![Jeremy Hunt is set to impose contracts on medics [Image: PA].](https://voxpoliticalonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/160908-Jeremy-Hunt-1024x711.png)
Jeremy Hunt is set to impose contracts on medics [Image: PA].
If so, isn’t it interesting?
The Conservatives have done everything in their power – short of an outright ban – to stop ordinary working people from being able to launch civil court action against unfair contracts such as that offered by Mr Hunt.
But he’s going to end up in court anyway (or at least, his lawyers are – and at huge cost to the taxpayer, no doubt).
I don’t think the Conservatives expected this. Their belief is that people are naturally selfish – like them – and the thought of banding together for the greater good will not occur to the plebs.
Crowd-funded cases like this show that if we pool our resources, we can put them out of reckoning.
Now all that is needed is a victory.
Junior doctors today urged the public to trust them with the future of the NHS as they prepared for a High Court showdown with Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt.
The Justice for Health campaign, formed by five London doctors, insists it is acting in the best interests of patients by seeking to block new contracts due to be im-posed from next month as part of the Government’s drive towards a “seven-day NHS”.
The legal action is backed by £300,000 in public donations raised by a crowdfunding appeal. The group, who say they have never been politically active before, spoke out today as a report from The King’s Fund revealed the unprecedented strain on the NHS.
It found:
- Almost six million patients attended A&E between April and June.
- 90 per cent of inpatient beds were occupied — above safe limits.
- 3.9 million people were on a waiting list for treatment, the most for a decade.
A two-day High Court hearing will begin on September 19, after Mr Justice Green decided that concerns over the imposition of the junior doctors’ contract should be heard. Prior to forming Justice for Health, the medics — Ben White, Nadia Masood, Francesca Silman, Marie-Estella McVeigh and Amar Mashru — had never met.
Source: Junior doctors in Jeremy Hunt court challenge ‘fighting for patients’ | London Evening Standard
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Good for these Doctors, i believe that they are concerned for the future of the NHS unlike our tory government.
Just hope that the legal teams and the judge are totally fair, charged up with integrity and not aligned to any Cons sympathies and Elites. A few years ago one would not
have any judgement call on judges decisions but recently decisions in Courts have reached some pretty unusual decisions.
The new Junior Doctor Contract is not safe for doctors nor patients.
The court can realise this from the published science of Karoshi, the death from sleep deprivation / over long working dating back to 1969 for case studies.
Burn out stress is known to cause amnesia for even the most basic of tasks.
The insurance industry lists junior doctors as the 3rd most likely to have a car crash after over-long working shifts.
It is surprising that the Health and Safety Executive has not become involved in an obviously dangerous shift pattern being imposed already on nurses and new doctors on the new contract. Never mind the current doctors who would need to have a change of contract to sign.
What Karoshi studies proved is that the waking, left brain hemisphere can be asleep even though you are walking, talking, driving, and so you are running on auto pilot. Life or death decisions are then being made by doctors without the capacity for clear thinking. This is a clear and present danger to patients.
Karoshi showed students kept over-long awake and then put on driving simulators, crashed every time if needed to think about a situation on the road. So total lack of due care and attention.
Burn out stress being suffered is a preventable stress injury to a doctor, and therefore the management is undertaking breach of health and safety of staff. Once burned out, the doctor has lost their profession and made unemployed maybe for life.
For the same number of doctors within a 5 day shift rota, being stretched to 7 days, is bad management practice for health and safety of doctor and patient.
A court needs the HSE experts present re stress injury and other expert campaigners on the work issue.
Not for nothing did we fight, literally, as members of trade unions long into the past for the 8 hour day. It is a natural law of the body and the mind and the spirit ie in mental hygiene re prevention of stress induced mental health issues.
Crowd Funding to challenge this destructive Tory Government are long overdue, If their actions have to be challenged in courts, so be it.