Junior doctors' strike: Patients deserve better, from doctors and Government

This dispute highlights the need for a fundamental re-assessment of how we fund the NHS. It's time for a tax to keep the health service afloat

Demonstrators hold placards as they protest during a Junior Doctors' strike outside St Thomas' Hospital in central London (Getty Images)

It goes without saying that today is not a good day to be taken seriously ill in England. A failure to compromise and a stubborn intransigence on both sides has brought us to a place where, for the first time in the NHS’s history, even the most seriously ill patients will be denied comprehensive medical care.

Yes, senior doctors will do their best to fill in and ensure that the strike does not lead to avoidable loss of life. But this is far from a foregone conclusion and, at best, patients taken in to hospital on Tuesday or Wednesday this week cannot expect anything other than stretched and perfunctory attention. A schism within the medical profession is also now likely, with junior doctors proceeding with an all-out strike without the explicit backing of the profession's Royal Colleges. Patients deserve better – both from their Government and their doctors.

Jeremy Hunt and David Cameron have been far too willing to engineer this showdown to keep alive their wider goal of increasing NHS services across seven days a week on an already stretched budget. Some in the doctors union, meanwhile, have been equally keen to take on the Tory government, rather than engaging more constructively to improve the lot of their membership.

Away from the immediate battlefield, this dispute highlights the need for a fundamental re-assessment of how we fund the NHS. The public overwhelmingly wants an NHS that is better funded than it is today and where a seven-day NHS would not mean robbing Dr Peter to pay Nurse Paul. But we often don’t see the link between that funding and the taxes that we pay.

If we are to have an informed and honest debate about the kind of health service we want in the future and how, as a society, we are going to pay for it, then a specific and ring-fenced NHS tax is the only solution. This current crisis illustrates why it is an idea whose time has come.