Tuesday, April 24, 2007

The Lobby


Today was the mass medical lobby at Parliament. It started with a rally outside the House of Commons with cross party speakers (Conservative Andrew Lansley, Lib Dem Norman Lamb and Labour Ian Gibson), the RemedyUK organisers and hundreds of doctors from every grade.

After that it was time to lobby my local MP (David Howarth) along with Dr Rupert Beale and Dr Zoe Fritz. David Howarth MP, was very supportive of both junior doctors' concerns and the concerns regarding patient safety. In the short term, patient safety may be compromised when job changes come into effect on 1st August, and in the long term patient safety may be compromised if consultant doctors have not been given enough time to train within their chosen specialty (training time to become an orthopaedic consultant surgeon has been cut from 22,000 hours to a mere 6,000 under the propsed MMC).

Previously this blog has written about the thoughts from three eminent consultants, and today there was a debate in the House about these impending changes. Andrew Lansley suggested that Patricia Hewitt was in "denial" about the scale of the disaster created by MMC and her "chronic mismanagement". He went onto highlighted that she has scheduled the 'second MMC review' to report in September. However, as 1st August is the key date when doctors start new jobs, such a review date is too little, too late.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good to see you there. Sarah