Payrise Offer A PR Stunt, Say Junior Doctors

The Health Secretary has been accused of making "headline grabbing" last-ditch payrise offers to junior doctors to force them to drop their strike action threat.

Jeremy Hunt announced a 11% rise in basic pay as part of a package of concessions to changes being made to junior doctors' contracts.

Mr Hunt has written personally to all junior doctors in England with a "firm" contract offer that sees three-quarters of medics receiving a pay rise.

But the British Medical Association accused him of using "megaphone diplomacy" and pushing "PR stories" in an attempt to avert strike action by junior doctors, rather than entering into proper negotiations.

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Mr Hunt has introduced the new junior doctors contract in an attempt to tackle the problems of under-staffing in hospitals and surgeries at the weekends as the Government pushes for a seven-day NHS.

Under the revised offer, Mr Hunt has also extended the defined "unsocial hours" that qualify for higher pay rates to include Saturday evenings after 7pm. Previously he had said that doctors would only have received the higher rate after 10pm.

Currently junior doctors get higher pay for working between 7pm and 7am and all day on Saturday and Sunday.

The contract reiterates the "cast-iron" guarantee that doctors will work an average 48-hour week, with a maximum set at 72 hours, down from 91.

There will also be "golden hello" premiums paid to those working in general practice, A&E and psychiatry, which currently have high vacancy rates.

Junior doctors fear they will see an overall reduction in salary of around 30% but speaking to Sky News Mr Hunt said that 99% would suffer no cut in pay at all.

However, he admitted 500 doctors would see a reduction but only because they were working "unsafe" numbers of hours.

Mr Hunt said: "At the moment we have very high weekend rates and we have two-thirds of our hospitals in deficit at the moment and what those weekend rates do, is they force hospitals to rosta around three times less medical cover.

"What you have noticed at the weekends and that's where we have an independent study published in September that said the mortality rate for people admitted at weekends was higher - one of the reasons they say that needs to be look at is the medical cover at weekends."

The British Medical Association (BMA) will begin balloting its junior doctor members for industrial action this Thursday. It would be only the second time in the past 43 years.

It has refused to re-enter negotiations over the new contract and has warned doctors that the contact will result in pay cuts and dangerously long working hours.

Many junior doctors are furious over the plans, with several thousand marching through Westminster last month .

Johann Malawana, chairman of the BMA's junior doctors committee, told Sky News: "We want to see proposals that have meaningful safeguards that prevent doctors actually working excessive hours ...

"In the proposals we have seen so far, the very safeguards that have driven down hours and keep hours lower within the NHS are actually the safeguards that Jeremy Hunt is now saying he wants to stop and what he is offering instead are not meaningful safeguards on those doctors' hours.

"These are a matter of details but these are matters of detail that should be dealt with in a meaningful negotiation. They should not be just headline-grabbing PR stories."