Dr Nadia Masood was listening to LBC and James O’Brien was talking about the first junior doctors’ strike, which was due the next day,” she recalls. “I pulled over, phoned in and ended up on air, trying to explain to listeners why we were going on strike. I was feeling very emotional both because of my mum and because of the strike.”
It was unusual behaviour for the 35-year-old anaesthetic registrar.
“I’m from a completely apolitical background. I didn’t have a political bone in my body until the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, decided to impose an unfair and unjust contract on 54,000 junior doctors,” Masood says.
“At first I saw the contract as an ethical, not political, issue. It wasn’t right to impose a contract on a workforce who give up their entire lives and pour blood, sweat and tears into their jobs and have no choice but to work under the conditions the NHS gives us, because that’s the only way we can become consultants, which is our goal. I was shocked Jeremy Hunt had the balls to do it.”
The next day brought the first of what would be eight strikes between January and May.
They pitted young medics renowned as workhorses of the NHS against a health secretary regarded with deep suspicion by the medical profession for his disparaging comments about GPs and consultants. Doctors in scrubs on picket duty outside their hospitals vied with Hunt for public sympathy over his insistence that juniors had to work more at weekends to deliver the government’s promised “truly seven-day NHS”.
“We spoke about how the NHS was already at breaking point, with too few staff and too little money to do its job properly. But no one took notice of us. But a year on, people like [the NHS England chief executive] Simon Stevens and [the NHS Providers chief executive] Chris Hopson, who distanced themselves from us a year ago, are now saying publicly what we were saying then, that the NHS is struggling with the lack of funding that it has.”
Read the full article here:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jan/02/junior-doctor-nadia-masood-jeremy-hunt-driven-us-out-of-nhs