Next week, for two of seven days, your hospitals and general practices will be emptied of their junior doctors. We'll still be there covering the emergencies, but non-urgent care will carry on without us. I'll wake up, I have no doubt, feeling queasy with guilt, and will drag a heavy heart to the picket line.
No one wins in an industrial dispute that's become as toxic as it is tiresome, but for the public – who are by far the biggest losers – patience must be wearing exceedingly thin.
I'm haunted by the fear that you must listen to both sides, government and doctors, insisting they prioritise patient safety above everything, while feeling thoroughly sick and tired with the whole lot of us.
When helping is ingrained in what you do, leaving those for whom you care feels wretched. And yet – yet again – I'll be on strike next week. Like 98% of junior doctors, I feel the government has left me no choice. Because for all the heartache and frustration next week's strike will provoke for patients, the alternative is so much worse.
David Cameron would have you believe this dispute is about nothing more noble than our pay packets. He has a vision, he will tell you, of a "truly seven-day NHS" – which only the avarice of junior doctors stands in the way of. But this is not a pay dispute. None of us chose medicine to get rich quick, and none of us are asking for more money.
This is a matter of putting patients first. As someone who already works one weekend in four on the frontline of the NHS, I'm pretty certain the strength of my desire for better weekend services vastly outstrips my Prime Minister's. I desperately want the CT and MRI scanners my patients need up and running on Saturdays and Sundays. I desperately want their biopsies processed, their lab results calculated, as swiftly at the weekend as any other day.
What I want for my patients, in essence, is the small army of NHS staff who provide care five days a week, on duty for seven.
But – and this is the crux of the matter – what I will never do is pretend that you can have a "seven-day NHS" without funding it. David Cameron claims he cares about patient safety at weekends, yet he's pledged not one single extra pound towards an improved weekend hospital service. Instead, his government's cheapskate solution is to stretch an already broken workforce of juniors so that we provide seven days care for the price of five. That's not a pledge, it's a scam.
What you need, to put weekends on a par with weekdays, is a whole new raft of staff, safely delivering new weekend services. Jeremy Hunt's own Department of Health has estimated – in figures leaked to the Guardian newspaper – that a seven-day NHS requires 11,000 more staff, 4000 of which are doctors. Yet right now, across the UK, thousands of NHS nursing and doctor posts lie vacant. BBC Freedom of Information requests have just revealed that the NHS currently has 6000 too few doctors. The gaps in our rotas already endanger our patients. If we are forced to work more thinly across seven days, what you will get in a "truly seven-day NHS" is a workforce of junior doctors who are too demoralised, too overworked and too exhausted to do a decent job for you. We have nothing left to give as it is, and burned out doctors are a threat to patient safety.
My duty as a doctor is therefore to strike. But as a mother of two young children, as well as junior doctor, I don't want my strike days to be spent in vain. Next week, on 9th-10th March, for any Mumsnetters who'd like them, junior doctors are ready and waiting to provide local basic life support training sessions aimed at mothers with babies and young children in particular. Our #littlelifesavers sessions will teach you with the skills to handle an emergency with your child, such as choking or stopping breathing. Every #littlelifesavers group of doctors will include a qualified advanced life support instructor. Please email [email protected] if you'd like us to set up a local session with you. We'll try our very hardest to make this happen.
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