The end of another week…
Coming up to the end of another month…
Maybe a good time to stop. Have a bit of a think.
It looks to me like we are going around in circles. The same thinking that got us here, is keeping us here.
If I can mix my metaphors from circles to triangles… it looks to me we are in a curious triangle. Three corners of the same problem.
Stuck.
I’m talking about the junior doctors’ decision to continue their industrial action for pay restoration.
They are careful to avoid the words ‘pay-rise’. They want to claw-back the value of their wages, eroded over time, by inflation, successive exploitative governments and frankly neglect and mismanagement by their trades union…
… you have to ask; if they are looking to restore value amounting to 35% what has the BMA been doing for twelve years? Nothing effective, is the answer.
The BMA are demanding a huge amount of money. However sympathetic you might be, to their cause, it’s obviously a non-starter. They can’t move.
They are stuck, because…
In the next corner, HMG.
They’ve said, ‘it’s 6% plus a lump sum, and that’s that’.
Even more importantly, its not just Bully-Boy Barclay that’s said it.
The Prime Minister has said it. Which means the Cabinet are fully signed up and even if Barclay is shuffled in the Autumn, Sunak cannot, now, about-face.
HMG has taken the whole problem to a new dimension. They can’t move.
They are stuck.
And, in the third corner, the patients.
What ever their clinical priority, their sinister symptoms, their pain and discomfort, coming up to a million people will have been bumped out of their place on NHS waiting lists.
No one cares. The doctors have stopped behaving like doctors and governments have stopped behaving like a government.
They are stuck. Everyone is stuck.
Support for junior doctors has grown from 47% in January to 56% in June and as Keiran Pedley, Research Director at Ipsos, said;
‘… findings reflect a consistent pattern… whereby the public tend to be most likely to support strike action for professions… they hold a more positive view of.’
However, there is an important point.
Ipsos interviewed a representative quota sample of 1,092 adults aged 16-75 in Great Britain, between 31st March and 1st April this year.
The reason that is important?
First; it was Great Britain and not England.
Second; older people are more likely to be waiting for an NHS appointment, diagnosis and treatment and people who have actually been dumped by strikes may take a different view.
Ipsos tell us, data are weighted to match the profile of the population.
Despite the huge number waiting it is a smallish percentage (say13%) of the total English population.
The real opinion we need to hear is from people being turfed off the lists… and…
Third; this was an on-line poll… likely to disfavour older participants. Pollsters say they can adjust for this but I don’t buy it and they actually admit;
‘…all polls are subject to a wide range of potential sources of error.’
In other words their results could be meaningless.
Perhaps more significantly YouGov polled for Independent Age‘s evidence to the HSC and included 8,000 people aged over 50 and found;
- 10% of people aged 50+ reported that they were on a waiting list.
- In September ’21, there were 699,823 people waiting for orthopaedic treatment – it’s likely a large proportion of these were people in later life. (It’ll be more now).
- 52% of people aged 50+ waiting for treatment said they were in daily pain.
- 55% said that they have some difficulty with day-to-day activities
- Only 15% of older people waiting for surgery received information about how to manage their pain and symptoms.
You can view, this industrial action as a war and older people most likely to be the hidden collateral damage.
The BMA look likely to ignore how many are shoved-off their turn in the queue and despite…
- 55-75yrs are the most likely to vote and …
- between 2015 and ’17 the Tories increased their share of the vote by about 5%, adding a further %point in 2019… the bulk of that extra support… was from the two oldest age groups…
… politicians still have tin ears.
Older people have no union, no voice and are easy for youth and ambition to overlook.
Take my advice. Don’t get old.
Have the best weekend you can.
News and Comment from Roy Lilley
Contact Roy – please use this e-address roy.lilley@nhsmanagers.net
Reproduced at thetrainingnet.com by kind permission of Roy Lilley.
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