The chickens will come home to roost.
We are told often enough that those working for the NHS have it good & that terms in the private sector are worse. Somehow not many have been convinced. Sandra Parsons appears to be having some trouble at home & has this to say in the Times:
The professionals with real grounds for grievance are doctors. The current jobs fiasco, presided over by the newly resigned Health Secretary, Patricia Hewitt, means that with less than a month to go before new training posts start on August 1, 11,000 junior doctors don’t know whether they have a job.
The term junior doctor refers to anyone not yet a consultant. Of those who do have posts, hundreds will have to relocate to take them, moving homes, uprooting children from schools and forcing spouses to change jobs – all for a position guaranteed at most for one year and often only six months before the merry-go-round begins again.
These are people who were the brightest and hardest working at school; you don’t get to study medicine with much less than three A* these days. They then endured six years of medical school before taking their first bottom-rung jobs, working relentless hours with little sleep. They are now embarking on their chosen speciality, for which they will have to pass two or three stages of gruelling and demanding exams, and for which they must study while also working long and antisocial hours.
Those who survive will then be told by the chattering classes and the media that they should be grateful to have a “job for life†(until they make one mistake and kill someone, that is) and that they earn ludicrously “good†money (although not by lawyers’ standards, obviously). In most other countries in the world, a child’s ambition to become a doctor is greeted with pleasure and, frequently, proud rejoicing. The fact that the same cannot be said of Britain owes much to our increasingly cynical attitude.
I think cynical is the wrong word. The disenchantment is simply a reflection of the loss of status & of the low value society appears to place on the profession, measured by the standard currency of this capitalistic age i.e. money.
How many of us can imagine a normal working day that might include, as my husband’s did not long ago, treating two horrifically burnt children who die despite your best, most sustained, efforts? Which ends with your having to tell their mother, who is incoherent with grief, that her children are dead? Where the purpose of showering, when you eventually get home, is to rid yourself of the lingering smell of burnt flesh? I happen to think that’s worth the £70,000 a year a new consultant earns.
But back to our unhappy lawyers. Of the one in four who wished they had other jobs, the majority wanted to be journalists or writers (only 2 per cent fancied working for the NHS). The most popular reason for not switching careers? “The possible drop in salary.â€
A lesson in there somewhere perhaps?
And as mentioned yesterday, the bandwagon is rolling, having picked up a passenger along the way.
Even the announcement of the increased vetting of professionals appears not to have been thought through.
News of the review, unveiled at Mr Brown’s first prime minister’s questions, caught the Home Office and the Department of Health off guard, suggesting it was a last-minute decision.
The prime minister’s spokesman later said the government would also run checks on the migrant’s sponsors, whether they are organisations or individuals. In most cases in the NHS, the sponsor is a hospital so it is not clear what purpose a check on them might serve.
Health professionals were sceptical that Sir Alan is going to be able to find any loophole in the law, or obvious remedies. Vetting is currently undertaken by employers, in most cases hospitals.
It is possible Sir Alan will examine whether the intelligence services could be given access to details of doctors seeking employment. Few or no questions are asked on the political leanings of potential medical recruits.
Combined with the idiotic statement from an EU official proposing censorship of the internet along the lines of the Chinese system, I wonder just what wacky baccy these guys are smoking!