I have been observing the Junior Doctors' industrial dispute with the Government with interest. I am not expert on the detail, and cannot tell you what is the issue on which talks have foundered today (so seriously that Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, has now decided to impose a new contract). But I do know rather a lot of doctors socially - probably more than a dozen, if I stretched it - and here are a few things I've observed, or my friends have told me.
- "Junior doctors are absolutely no use". Thus spake an anaesthetist I know. "They just get in the way".
- "Junior doctors don't know anything. When I was training we basically lived in the hospital. That's how you learn. Now they're always wanting to get off home. No wonder they don't know anything". That one was from a consultant neurologist.
- A GP friend said to me, "The Blair Government made a big mistake with contracts. They told us we had to do things which we were doing anyway, and they offered to pay us extra if we did them. So we said OK, and they paid us a lot more for doing what we'd been doing already. We'd been struggling financially until then". This person, a good friend, put three children through public school and has a holiday house in the country.
- Ever Doctor that I know lives in a big house, with a big car outside (actually, most of them have two big cars outside).
- Every Doctor I know, notwithstanding recent changes, is sitting on a notional pension pot worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. To put it in context, if a Doctor retires on a pension of £48k (and that's the average) a pot of nearly £1,500,000 would be needed to fund it in the private sector. The average private sector pension pot? Rather under £40,000. The Doctor's pension pot doesn't in fact exist. The pension will be funded by working taxpayers.
- Every Doctor I know (and yes, they're mostly in their forties and fifties), is rather fond of expensive wine and goes on expensive holidays. I'll be going to a dinner tonight where the two doctors I'll be sitting with have recently gone skiing and ice climbing in Italy.
- Two of my neighbours, both Junior Doctors, are hoping to move to a house round the corner. The asking price? £750,000.
- Since 2010 public spending has been cut amongst many government departments, but the NHS has been ringfenced, and its budgets have actually been increased in real terms.
- A disproportionately large number of the BMA leadership are supporters of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party (if you doubt me, Google is always there for you).
Now for all I know Junior Doctors may be entirely deserving of more money and shorter working hours. It may be that if the Tories don't give them these things they will all decamp to New Zealand (and a doctor I met recently was doing just that). But on the face of it the facts would appear to be as follows:
- Junior Doctors of my friends' generation worked harder without complaint.
- Attempts to quantify what Doctors should do have to some degree had the effect of de-professionalising the profession. Junior Doctors used to work until the job was done because that devotion to duty meant that they learned more and they were more likely to get promoted. That may no longer be true to the same extent.
- Doctors have always struggled and suffered when they were young, and the reward was ease, status, promotion prospects, job security, affluence in middle age and a fantastic pension when you retired.
- The rewards for Doctors are way beyond the reach of the overwhelming majority of the ordinary people who pay for them.
- Every other corner of public service has suffered as, since 2010, the government has sought to get a grip on public expenditure. If it's right that the NHS should be exempt from those pressures as far as possible, it doesn't seem unreasonable for HMG to seek to make the service better and more efficient. Should Doctors be exempt from attempts to make the service better, and better value for money?
I make these observations aware that the plural of anecdote is not data, and raise these questions without knowing the answers. But when I look at the bright, shiny faces of the protesting Junior Doctors I don't see poor and downtrodden workers. They look to me instead like people who won a fairly substantial prize in the lottery of life, and who would rather see operations cancelled than that prize get even just slightly smaller.
