A junior doctor announced his intention to quit the NHS over unfair working conditions and pay on live TV ahead of an all-out strike.
Dr Ben White stands with a multitude of disenfranchised doctors who started their working careers with the intention of helping the needy until they found out the National Health Service had turned into a for-profit organisation.
Junior Doctors think that the whole NHS is jeopardized by the new working contracts offered by the government, turning them and other NHS staff into cheap, quick turnover, high productivity disposable assets, that are more suited for a place in a balance sheet than in front of a patient’s prognosis appraisal sheet.
Dr White quit momentarily after getting angry over the new working contracts that are going to be imposed by the Health Secretary.
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He has set about to fix one of the UK’s greatest social treasures, The NHS, before time runs out and it becomes a treasure in the pocket of the rich and the not so needy.
The Mirror reports:
Dr Ben White told viewers of ITV’s Good Morning Britain that he would be leaving his post as a trainee doctor to join the legal campaign against Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s plans.
Junior doctors are set to start an all-out strike which will last between 8am to 5pm on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Dr White assured patients that if they are unwell they should go to hospital as consultants would be covering emergency care.
He said: “I have taken the decision that I am resigning as a trainee doctor to focus on a legal campaign to fight the contract on behalf of my patients and on behalf of the NHS.”
Asked why it had come to this, he was visibly upset and said: “I really feel like we have been backed into a corner and there’s not a lot of sense coming out of the Government’s side of things.
“We have to put patients first and we can see at the moment the understaffing and the underfunding in the NHS.”
Dr White expressed his sympathy for people who have had their operations cancelled but insisted that the strike concerned the safety of patients.
He said: “If I had had an operation cancelled as a result of the strike I would be very annoyed or worse – there’s a chance I could have been harmed as a result of having an operation cancelled.
“We are sorry for that.”
The strike is “not just for now”, Dr White said, it is “for the future of the NHS”.
Dr White is part of the legal campaign launched by Justice for Health – an organisation made of a group of doctors.
They argue that the “decision to impose” the contract by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt was not lawful as he failed to undertake proper consultation before the decision.
It is separate from the British Medical Association’s challenge.
This strike is different to previous ones, as junior doctors will also refuse to provide emergency care.
Just over 12,700 operations have been cancelled and some 112,856 outpatient appointments will have to be re-arranged due to the industrial action.
NHS England has warned ambulance trusts may need to provide temporary treatment centres and hospitals must focus remaining staff on “essential services”, such as A&E, maternity, resuscitation, major incident plans and mental health crisis intervention.
This is the fifth walkout junior doctors have staged since January in protest at Heath Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s attempts to impose new contracts which are due to be introduced in August.
The strike over pay and working conditions looks almost certain to go ahead after the Health Secretary rejected a cross-party plan to pilot the contract first.
