Tag Archives: doctor

Has plan to double English medical students stalled so ‘physician associates’ can be installed instead?

Physician associate: training for these not-doctors is cropping up all over the place (this is at Chester University), while a government promise to fund more places for trainee doctors has proved to be economical with the truth.

A plan to increase the number of trainee doctors in England to 15,000 by 2031 has stalled, with only 350 places funded for 2025-6 – just a quarter of the expected annual total.

Ministers have dramatically stalled plans to double the number of doctors being trained in England by 2031 in a move that has caused dismay across the NHS, as well in medical schools and universities.

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In June last year, ministers backed a long-term plan to expand the NHS workforce and pledged, amid great fanfare, to “double medical school places by 2031 from 7,500 today to 15,000, with more medical school places in areas with the greatest shortages to level up training and help address geographic inequity”. Labour is also committed to raising the number of doctors to 15,000 by 2031.

But a leaked letter written jointly by health minister Andrew Stephenson and the minister for skills, apprenticeships and higher education, Robert Halfon, to the independent regulator the Office for Students, says they will fund only 350 additional places for trainee doctors in 2025-26. This is less than a quarter of the annual number widely anticipated and there is no guarantee that even that level of resource will be repeated.

This Writer never believes any “long-term plan” announced by a government; these always seem to be bids for short-term boosts in popularity. Last year’s announcement about medical students seems a perfect example.

I also wonder whether the Tories are trying to save money by force-replacing doctors with controversial ‘physician associates’ – under-qualified substitutes for doctors whose decisions have proved dangerous, and occasionally fatal.

Source: Government delays plans to double number of medical students in England | NHS | The Guardian


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Striking doctors are being invited to work abroad and starve the NHS of talent

Pay restoriation is the goal: striking junior doctors on the picket lines on January 5.

Junior doctors are striking for pay restoration because they don’t want to be forced to move abroad in order to be able to make ends meet.

That is the revelation on the third day of their longest strike yet.

Doctors were on their picket lines from 7am today (January 5), pledging to keep up the pressure for the Tory government to restore their real-terms pay to its 2010 level – the same level that MP pay has always maintained:

If the government refuses to level up their pay, the alternative for many junior doctors is to emigrate to another country that provides a better rate of pay. Dr Andrew Meyerson lays out the facts here:

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More than 11,000 doctors left the UK for jobs in other countries in 2022, at a time when the UK already had fewer doctors per 1,000 patients than other OECD nations:

This means the Tory government’s intractability on pay is creating a serious staffing shortage in the NHS. This can only be seen as a deliberate choice to starve the NHS of talent.

And the situation is likely to get worse:

Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak (foolishly) pledged to cut NHS waiting lists last year and is being challenged on how he proposes to achieve this in the face of the strike:

The only way This Writer can see that promise being fulfilled is if Sunak gives the work to private health firms – who employ NHS doctors and nurses at higher rates of pay.

This means the government would be paying private companies more money to provide the same service it could get for a much more cost-effective price on the NHS.

And all the while, the government would be continuing to starve people who work exclusively for the NHS of the pay they need to make ends meet.

Sunak is supposed to be clever with numbers. Why does he find it impossible to do the arithmetic here?


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Tory line on why they won’t negotiate with junior doctors is gibberish

Steve Barclay: watch him stutter through his nonsense argument against negotiating a better pay deal for junior doctors.

Listen to the nonsense that issues from former Health Sec Steve Barclay’s lips when he’s challenged on why his government won’t negotiate with striking junior doctors, while they’re on strike.

I don’t actually agree with Peter Stefanovic about Susanna Reid; she could have been much more incisive.

The issue is that the government says it will not negotiate on pay with junior doctors while they are involved in strike action. It will only talk if they call their strikes off.

But if they call their strikes off, then the government won’t have any reason to negotiate on pay with junior doctors. So it won’t; it will merely continue to impose punitive real-terms pay cuts.

“There was a catch, and it was Catch-22.”

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As a member of the public, you need to be aware of this Tory government tactic, and of how unfair it is.

Doctors’ pay has been eroded by more than one-third – by Tory governments – in the years since they took over responsibility for the health service in 2010. By comparison, Tory MPs’ salaries have remained at the same level, in real terms, as they were in 2010.

The only way the Tories would have a tenable argument against increasing junior doctors’ pay by the 35 per cent needed to return it to parity with 2010 would be if their own pay had also tumbled. It hasn’t, so they don’t.

Do you remember the Tory mantra from the general election of 2010? It was “We’re all in it together.”

Could there be a stronger argument than this that they were lying?


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Right-wing rag attacks junior doctors as winter viruses surge

Striking doctors: they’re being blamed for the expected effects of increases in “winter viruses” – but won’t those increases be due to the stupidity of the people spreading them? And will they be spread as far, if Tory inflation means people haven’t been able to afford to go out as much this year?

How nice of the Tory-supporting rags to blame junior doctors for pressure on the NHS caused by the so-called “winter viruses” – flu, norovirus and Covid-19.

Junior doctors are set to walk out for six consecutive days next week, in the latest part of their long-running dispute with the government over pay.

So media outlets like The Times are blaming them for any increased suffering that may happen during that time – ignoring the fact that this, and the 974,000 missed appointments alleged to have happened so far, could have been avoided if the Tories had simply paid them the appropriate wage.

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The Times reported,

In the week to Christmas Eve, there were an average of 942 patients with flu in hospital each day, including 48 in critical care. It is almost six times higher than the 160 average four weeks ago. Meanwhile 452 hospital patients on average were there because of norovirus symptoms, which include diarrhoea and vomiting, and 3,620 patients had Covid-19 — up by over a half from the month before.

And it quoted Sir Stephen Powis, NHS national medical director, who said the impact of care was likely to be

“much more severe next week with six days of industrial action planned by junior doctors, the longest in NHS history, at a time when hospitals usually experience the most pressure with high demand and higher levels of virus admissions”.

Covid cases were expected to rise to a peak around December 30, in the aftermath of Christmas gatherings. Here‘s the i:

Covid cases are expected to have risen sharply as JN.1, the new highly-contagious dominant subvariant, spreads rapidly – increasing its share of new UK infections to 48 per cent on December 23rd, making it the biggest strain in the country.

In the aftermath of Christmas, where people have spent prolonged periods together indoors, cases are expected to keep rising for at least the next few days, according to Professor Karl Friston, a virus modeller at University College London.

It is common for illnesses to increase around the Christmas period as people socialise more and cold conditions help viruses to thrive, at the same time as weakening our resistance to them.

There are also concerns about waning immunity to Covid … As a result, scientists fear that a higher proportion of those cases could become severe this year than last year.

The increased chance of serious illness also pushes up the risk of a person going on to develop long Covid because serious cases are more likely to lead to that condition.

This is all perfectly plausible – but it omits one important factor in the spread of any disease: human stupidity.

If sick people have been infecting others at Christmas gatherings, what possessed them to go there? If they were feeling flu-ey (or whatever), why didn’t they do the decent thing and stay at home?

In This Writer’s own family, Mrs Mike’s mother had to stay away from our family gathering this year because her boyfriend (I know it’s weird to talk about them like that when they’re in their late 70s, but what other word is there?) visited her, despite having Covid.

He ended up having to self-isolate – and is now in hospital because of complications that may have arisen because of the Covid – and she agreed that she should stay away, to avoid the possibility of infecting the rest of us.

So that was a couple of people’s Christmas ruined; worse than the one that it could have been if he’d stayed away, but better than spreading it among the rest of us.

Conversely, the dire economic effects of having a Tory government might have worked in our favour: I visited my local pub yesterday evening for the first time in a fortnight and it was very quiet indeed.

My friendly neighbourhood bartender told me it had been like that all the way through the Festive Season so far, and we agreed that, what with the higher cost of food this year because of Tory inflation, together with the strain of buying presents, people probably didn’t have any cash left with which to go out.

It harms the economy – if money can’t be spread around as much as it was before, then some businesses will suffer and may even go under.

But that’s Tory politics for you. Their aim is always to concentrate all the cash – and therefore all the power – among a few people at the top.

It may lead to lower-than-expected “winter virus” infections this year – I’d like to hope so and we’ll have to monitor the results carefully – but that’s an unintended consequence.

And the full extent of harm to the economy may not become clear for some time to come.

Source: Winter viruses surge before longest junior doctors’ strike


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Is the government refusing to hire doctors because of this?

Hospital ward: the staff are just blurs because they’re so overworked, they’re moving faster than the eye can see (or maybe it’s just a camera effect, I have to explain before some halfwit deliberately takes me literally and tries to pick a fight).

It’s alleged that the government is refusing to let the NHS hire medical experts in order to create a fake crisis.

This, apparently, will then allow the gaps to be filled with unqualified “Physician Associates”:

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Does anybody know more about this?

Let’s have some information and put it out to the voting public.


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The Germans had more right to execute Edith Cavell than Israel to kill this doctor

Killed: Dr Hammam Alloh.

Around 200 medical workers in Gaza have been killed during Israel’s current assault on the enclave, we are told.

Among them is Dr Hammam Alloh, who died caring for patients at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza.

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A British doctor, Louise Raw, compared his death with that of nurse Edith Cavell during World War One:

But Edith Cavell was arrested and convicted by the Germans for helping allied soldiers escape German-occupied Belgium and enter the neutral Netherlands, which was a war crime according to German law at the time.

Questions have been raised over whether the sentence was legal, but even Miss Cavell agreed that the German authorities had the right to carry out justice over her.

They had more right to do so than Israel has to kill medical staff at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, in fact – people who have done nothing more than carry out their duty of care to patients there.

Dr Raw is absolutely right to contrast the reactions to Miss Cavell’s death with those to the staff at al-Shifa.

Why was it more objectionable to execute a nurse who was a war criminal than it is to murder medical staff in a facility that it is a war crime to attack?


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Junior doctor explains the facts of NHS strikes on TV. SHE won’t be asked back!

Junior doctors are striking for the restoration of pay that has been cut by 35 per cent: apparently the government is giving the cash to private contractors instead.

This was a tour-de-force performance by junior doctor Anna Warrington.

Invited onto the BBC’s Politics Live, she explained how blame for the costs of the junior doctors’ strike lies entirely at the door of a Tory government that has been so stupid, for so many years, that it never made any contingency plans for problems delivering healthcare.

There’s a clip below but it doesn’t contain the full interview. Initially, presenter Jo Coburn challenged Dr Warrington to explain

why the total cost of the junior doctor walkouts – 19 days before last week – is likely to be more than £1 billion.

Dr Warrington said: “It is – I think – outrageous that the NHS is reliant on private contractors to complete everyday, essential services.

“Where was the government’s workforce planning when they slashed successive pay rounds, year on year, so that there are too few doctors and nurses to staff the NHS adequately without reaching out to private contractors – who can reasonably charge a private contractor’s rate?”

Stymied there, Ms Coburn generalised the question out: how did junior doctors justify any cost to their walkouts at all?

“I think it’s justified by the strength of the crisis that we are facing in the NHS at the moment,” said Dr Warrington. “I’m not just striking for pay restoration for myself; I’m striking for NHS restoration for the public.

“Every day, at work, I see one doctor doing the job of three. I see operating theatres closed due to lack of staffing. The patients aren’t getting value for money. The NHS is in crisis. This is due to chronic underfunding, a failure of workforce planning, and a failure to remunerate staffing adequately, as a result of which there simply aren’t enough people left to make this service function – in addition to which, the buildings are crumbling.

“The NHS is at the point of total destruction, in my experience at work and those of my colleagues in addition. It’s worth investing £1.8 billion finger-pointing at the government so that they take action, because this is a crisis.”

Next:

So the amount being quoted as the cost per staff member, per shift, was the maximum possible. You see how the government seems to have twisted information there?

Hearing a panellist saying the solution has to be through negotiation, Dr Warrington pointed out: “The government aren’t negotiating.”

Would she get a better deal from a Labour government?

“I’m not assured that the solution is obvious, nor that any political party is in possession of it.

“In this discussion earlier, we were talking about privatised services and how those have not succeeded, and I am not convinced that we know that privatising any limb of the NHS will result in better value for the customer.

“If people are concerned about the moral repugnance of doctors charging three grand a shift now, imagine what it will be like when it has been privatised – believe me.”

Asked who is putting forward the idea that the NHS is going to be privatised (an idea put forward by several members of that day’s panel), Dr Warrington said: “My understanding is that successive Conservative governments have beleaguered the NHS so that very few alternatives are available.

“I think introducing market forces into the health service … has been extended further by the Conservatives, to the extent that we find ourselves where we are now.

“There are private contractors in the NHS; they do charge more, and the NHS has to pay what they charge until the NHS is adequately staffed itself and, unfortunately, because of successive pay cuts to the tune of 35 per cent, mind – remember, this is pay restoration, not a pay rise – there is now a workforce crisis that is driving the NHS further into the ground.

“The public are not getting value for money; something must be done. I do think that the very least that the government could do is come into negotiations with the doctors, who do see what it is like on the ground.”

The Tory then claimed it was ludicrous to complain about having private doctors providing NHS services, as long as those services were free at the point of use – thereby undermining Ms Coburn’s attack line about the cost of bringing in private contractors to cover the cost of strikes.

Dr Warrington picked up on this: “I thought there was some moral affront earlier at the idea that these strikes were costing money because private contractors had to be paid to cover the cost of doctors.

“And that is the same on every day of the week; there are private contractors fulfilling the role, and if I was a patient, I consider it poor value for money. As a doctor, I’m delighted that some of my pay can be restored through additional work.”

At least, I think that’s what she said. She was being drowned out by the Tory on the panel. Perhaps he didn’t like the point she was making – that she could work as a private doctor, within the NHS, and demand higher pay for doing so; this proved her point that allowing private contractors into the NHS is poor value for public money.

What a brilliant performance. She absolutely destroyed any argument against the junior doctors’ strikes.

Sadly, knowing the political climate – in which both Labour and the Tories are planning to bring in more privatisation, spending far more on private contractors in the NHS than the service’s own staff – we can be assured that Dr Warrington’s words have guaranteed only one thing.

She won’t be asked back onto Politics Live.


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Help these charity runners fund a retreat to boost mental health in UK armed forces

Forming a positive baseline (left-right): Craig, Barney and Steve, training for their run at Cosford on September 30.

A friend of This Writer is joining a 24-hour running challenge to raise funding for a charity that helps UK armed forces personnel cope with mental ill-health.

Craig Chihuri, who lives here in Mid Wales, will join Barney Tierney, Steve Dowd and Dr Rebecca Cam to run 74 miles in 24 hours at RAF Cosford Athletic track, starting at midday next Saturday (September 30, 2023).

The group is raising funds to develop a holistic and positive seven-day retreat for anyone who has served, and is still serving, in any branch of the UK military, who wishes to improve their mindset and outlook.

The retreat will be run by Head Up – Mental Health awareness for UK Armed Forces. The charity was created by four veterans to help forces personnel build a positive mindset and improve their mental resilience.

“There have been a lot of ex-Army people who have been struggling with their mental health,” said Craig, “so if we can raise awareness, and raise a bit of money, it will be great.

“Head Up charity is great – it’s smaller, it’s coming up, so there’s more focus on raising that awareness.”

“Both myself and Craig, over the last four or five years, have done different events for Mind,” added Barney. “Over the past 18 months or so, I have worked at RAF Cosford, so I wanted to relate it to where I work and find a mental health charity within the military.

“We’ve done bike rides from Birmingham to Aberystwyth, then we ran from Birmingham to Aberystwyth, and then we went up and down Snowdon nine times.

“I feel like this one could potentially be up there with the hardest,” he said. “It’s purely 24 hours through the night. We’ve never done anything where you haven’t got a rest through the whole 24 hours. It’s 74 miles in 24 hours and we’ve never done anything on that scale before.”

More details about Head Up are available here.

These runners are relying on your support, so please dig out some pennies and give them a boost. Barney is running a JustGiving page so please make your donation here.


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Why do useless Tory MPs think they deserve so much more pay than life-saving docs?

Who would have thought that this cartoon could be re-used? Now, as when he was Health Secretary, Tory Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has doctors on the rack. He’s not going to pay them the 35% cost-of-living increase he owes them – but he and his colleagues have been happy to take a 42% rise for themselves.

Take a look at the clip below, in which Steve Brine MP, Tory chair of the Commons Health and Social Care Committee, says junior doctors do not deserve the 35 per cent pay increase that would be required to give them parity with their pay in 2010:

Now read this:

Conservative MPs have been worse than useless to the UK since 2010.

They have plunged the country into five times the debt it had in 2005, with nothing to show for it but a crashing economy and nose-diving public services, including a National Health Service that is constantly on the verge of collapse due to intrusive privatisation and over-demand due to the effects of all the Tories’ other policies.

Junior doctors, working within that crashing health service even as it crumbles around them, are far more valuable – for the obvious reason: They are genuine life savers.

But it is the Tory MPs who hold the purse strings.

They could have refused the recommended pay rises that have been offered to them since 2010 but they haven’t. They have taken the money. They have also taken huge wodges of cash in donations from businesspeople, along with the advice of those donors on what to do. You can form your own conclusion about the value of that advice to the majority of us.

And while taking all that filthy lucre – a higher proportional increase than the amount the junior doctors have lost over the same period of time – the Tories have told junior doctors that they do not deserve a pay rise equal to the increase in the cost of living.

No wonder medical professionals are quitting the NHS as fast as they can.

There is a word for MPs like Mr Brine. It begins with a ‘C’ – but it sure isn’t ‘Conservative’.


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Don’t be misled by media lies: here are the reasons your doctors are on strike

Junior doctors have begun four days of strikes to raise awareness of the way the Tory government is crippling the NHS in England, repeating their call for better pay and more investment in the service. At the moment, Tory policy is killing people who should be getting treatment. Can you stomach that?

This is for anybody who still thinks doctors are harming England’s health service by going on strike: they are striking to stop the harm being inflicted by your Tory government!

This post may be quite long so, for those of you who don’t have much time, I’ll try to summarise it, here at the top:

Tory claims that their pay offer to doctors is fair are not true: it is a crappy real-terms pay cut.

Tory claims that their pay offer was recommended by an independent pay review body are also untrue: everybody on that organisation was employed by the Tory government and was told the exact amount the Tory government would make available for pay, before being told to make a decision on it.

Tory claims that doctors’ pay demands are inflationary are lies: junior doctors’ pay has fallen by 26 per cent, in real terms, since 2008. It is impossible for a decrease in costs to be inflationary. Many NHS doctors are now deeply in debt because of Tory pay cuts.

Tory claims that doctors are refusing to negotiate are lies: it is the Tory government that is refusing to negotiate.

Not only are the Tories refusing to negotiate; they are actually preparing to strip doctors of their right to strike, making it impossible for them ever to regain the fair pay and conditions that everybody working in the UK should have as a matter of course.

The NHS in England is currently under severe strain, with the number of people waiting for treatment now standing at 7.6 million – more than at any time in its 75-year history.

These problems were not caused by doctors but by deliberate Tory government de-funding; Tory ministers have taken money away from the health service in order to make it break down. People are dying because of Tory government policy – that is Steve Barclay’s intention; it is what Rishi Sunak wants.

The Tories have made multiple promises over the years that they have claimed will solve the problems facing the NHS – but it is Tory policy never to follow through on those promises.

Doctors are striking because these Tory policies mean they can no longer do their job.

Many of them are themselves facing mental illness due to the stress of being unable to treat people who desperately need help.

Over the same period of time that waiting lists have been lengthening, Tory government policy has been to privatise increasing numbers of NHS services, claiming that the introduction of private, profit-making corporations into healthcare will somehow make it more efficient, rather than draining funds from an already cash-starved organisation. The result has been catastrophic, with almost all parts of the English health service going from an operating surplus into deep debt. This has created even more stress for doctors.

The effect of this state-sponsored incompetence has been to push people into seeking private health treatment in order to jump the NHS queue – whether they can afford it or not. So not only is the NHS now in debt but so are many people who are suffering with illnesses and other conditions whose treatment should be funded by their National Insurance money and public funding.

Of course, it may be possible to get funding for health treatments via private insurance – if the insurer agrees that the policy you have is intended to pay for the treatment you need. Private insurance firms are salivating at the prospect of taking money from people whose health needs mean they cannot wait for an NHS that has been crippled by Tory de-funding to get round to them.

Those are the headline points. Now let’s put some meat on the bones.

Here’s Peter Stefanovic to explain the broad situation:

Here’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy and the Channel 4 News team to explain why the number of people waiting for help is soaring:

You’ll have noticed that the C4 News piece said strikes are disrupting services, and seen the defence of strikes by a doctor under interview. Here’s Grace Blakeley to further explain why doctors are striking:

Rishi Sunak, during a phone-in on LBC radio, blamed the increase in waiting lists on striking doctors. Here’s just one – factual – reaction to that:

And now let’s listen to a junior doctor named Olivia as she explains the facts of NHS life to a prime minister whose facial expression clearly shows that he couldn’t care less:

Here’s Dr Andrew Meyerson to explain how Tory government policy has crippled the NHS:

Here’s Channel 4 News (again), interviewing a GP on how he and others in his profession have been affected by the Tory-created problems in the NHS:

Here’s Dr Meyerson (again) on the medical debt inflicted on patients by Tory government policy:

Businesses – particularly insurance firms – know an opportunity when they see one. Here’s Axa, explaining why Tory government policy is ushering in an era of insurance-based healthcare, similar to the system in the United States, where health costs are a major cause of bankruptcy:

Now you have the facts. The question is: who do you support – the Tory government, or the striking doctors?


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The Livingstone Presumption is now available
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