Letters: Hunt’s recklessness will cost NHS dear

These letters appear in the 12th February 2016 edition of The Independent

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt appearing on the BBC One current affairs programme, The Andrew Marr Show. (PA)

With the imposition of a new contract for junior doctors against their will, the Heath Secretary must be wagering that despite such an unpopular move, junior doctors will still prefer to stay employed in the NHS under the new contract rather than to simply leave.

He is either reckless or ill-informed: the medical profession is already struggling to recruit and retain doctors, even before the announcement of imposition. Applications for medical schools this year are down 18 per cent nationally. The number of junior doctors staying in the NHS for specialty or GP training fell to 52 per cent this year, from 71 per cent four years ago. Retention rates of those already in specialty training are at an all-time low and continue to fall. General practice is in such crisis that GPs have threatened mass resignations if a desperately needed bailout package is not forthcoming.

If the Secretary of State were genuine in his concern about patient safety, he would be urgently investigating how to improve the retention of medical professionals and increase the number of doctors available to provide his desired seven-day services. The imposed contract may prove cheaper for NHS Trusts in the short term, but risks a critical exodus of doctors from the NHS which would prove catastrophic for tomorrow’s patients.

Dr HJ Willis

Birmingham

As a proportion of GDP spending, the NHS budget is outrageously low in comparison with European countries and the likes of Japan, Canada, Australia; they all come in around 10 per cent. Ours will be 6.2 per cent of GDP in 2016.

We need to raise taxes – on sugar, perhaps – and cease exploiting staff; not least recruiting migrant staff when if we paid decent salaries we could and should employ our own citizens.

Rosanne Bostock

Oxford

I left work last week and asked our nurses at the end of a 37.5 hour week how they’d feel if they weren’t yet halfway through the working week. Their replies are unrepeatable here.

Psychometric tests show junior doctors performing above average at the beginning of a working week. After 80/90 hours, they perform worse than a drunk driver. Well-publicised, tragic incidences of junior doctors dying in car crashes en route home after such shifts serve as a stark reminder of the dangers of work-related fatigue.

Would you want such an individual looking after your loved ones or driving your bus for that matter?

Hunt is provocatively and deliberately demoralising our junior doctors for his own ends. I think the arguments are confusing for the public but ask yourself this: who do you trust? The politicians or the doctors?

Dr Anne Marie Mitchell

Crieff, Perthshire

Any of us who attend hospitals across the land know what Mr Hunt seems not to – ie that there are far more pressing issues than a seven-day service; that our doctors’ goodwill is not a commercial commodity and is immeasurably more valuable for that, and that any public system will collapse without it

Michael Morse

Harrogate

Not being minded to reach a negotiated agreement, Jeremy Hunt plans to impose a contract instead. Perhaps he should also consider reviving the Master and Servant Act (abolished 1875) that allowed for the jailing of employees who broke the terms of their contract while he is at it?

Keith Flett

London N17

Doctors thinking of leaving the NHS should read AJ Cronin’s The Citadel, a devastating account of medicine before the NHS when Harley Street was crammed with greedy frauds and many honest doctors lacked the commercial skills to make their practices pay. The novel has the great lines: “You must carry on. You must keep on hoping and trying. That’s a doctor’s job.” Cronin knew what he was talking about: he was a doctor himself.

Stewart Trotter

London W9

Beware more miiltary intervention

You make a compelling point urging the US to seriously consider the offer of ground troops from its allies in the region, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and perhaps Turkey too (editorial, 10 February).

You refer to “moderates”, pro-West rebel groups fighting against the Syrian regime. As explained many times in the pages of this newspaper, with strong evidence by Robert Fisk, so-called moderate rebels such as the Free Syrian Army are more or less a fiction, with little existence outside the imagination of the US State Department.

You worry that the Russians are bombing the “moderates” in Syria, those “moderates” who even the State Department admitted several months ago no longer existed. We have to concede that our “allies” in Syria are not moderates, but have clear links to al-Qaeda, and in their methods and beliefs are no different to Isis.

Calls for intervention are growing, parallel to the calls to halt desperate refugees from Syria arriving on our doorstep. But please remember, we’ve been here before. The results of two decades of military interference in the Middle East by our governments, right in front of our eyes, are the very reason for today’s desperate situation. More military intervention will only increase the chaos and misery of the peoples of the Middle East.

You may ask how much worse things could get. Well, there are more countries to collapse and turn into hell.

Professor Bulent Gokay

Keele, Staffordshire

In 2009 my Christian Iraqi in-laws reluctantly fled Baghdad: a bomb had exploded in the block of flats where they lived and they had come to recognise that there was no future for the Christian population in that increasingly sectarian country. They travelled to Damascus and found a flat in a quiet suburb, with a church just down the road. They were very happy there.

I visited them twice at that time and I remember our christening my wife’s niece at Sednaya, where there has been a shrine, latterly a glorious convent, since the fifth century. We then visited Ma’loula, a monastery where the monks made and sold their own wine which could also be bought in off-licences in Damascus. We stayed a couple of nights at Tartus, where the Russians have a naval base, and we all danced the dabka under the moon on the sandy beach.

My daughter and I travelled up through Latakia and thence to Aleppo where we were struck by its tranquillity and by the harmonious way the different religious groups mingled together. The Grand Mosque was an oasis of peace and serenity alongside the hubbub of the massive Al-Madina souk.

This was Syria under the tyrant Bashar al-Assad. I have no doubt that progressive democrats, probably the finest people in the country, were frustrated at having to live in a dictatorship. But many of them, along with the rest of the population, will now be asking “what price security and secularity?”

Robert Curtis

Birmingham

The climate change deniers club

Your exposure of the nefarious activities of various right-wing think-tanks is timely (“Where Eurosceptics and climate change sceptics rub shoulders”, 11 February) As Bob Ward rightly says, “This small cabal is undermining the democratic process which should be based on robust and open debate”.

I have first-hand experience of this. Four years ago I organised an international conference on climate change in central London and invited Nigel Lawson to speak. He accepted “in principle”, but when I sent him the programme containing many knowledgable experts in the field of climate science, he immediately withdrew on the grounds that the other speakers on the programme were not “sufficiently eminent”.

Was what he actually meant that his absurd views on global warming would not stand scrutiny for a single minute in a room of people who actually understand the science?

Dr Robin Russell-Jones

Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire

Congratulations on the inspired typo in your round-up of the occupants of 55 Tufton Street, You report that the climate change deniers’ favourite boffin, Professor William Happer, has written an academic paper on behalf of “a shame oil company”. Some mistake surely – or was it?

David Milsted

Gillingham, Dorset

They say mumbai, we say bombay

And Bangalore instead of Bengaluru, I hope (Letters, 11 February). It is already so elsewhere: München in German is Munich in English and Monaco in Italian, Firenze in Italian is Florence in English and Florenz in German. The Independent has shown its independence.

B S Chandrasekhar

Gröbenzell, Germany

When dogs fall foul of the demon drink

Should your pooch be feeling a little “ruff” after a swift half at the Rover’s Return Letters, (10 February), there is only one tried and tested solution....

Stan Broadwell

Bristol