Junior Doctors’ Contracts

Part of Opposition Day — [8th allotted day] – in the House of Commons at 4:46 pm on 28 October 2015.

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Photo of Jeremy Hunt Jeremy Hunt The Secretary of State for Health 4:46, 28 October 2015

That is exactly what I would like to happen, but it can happen only if members of the BMA walk through my office door—it is open—and sit down and start negotiating, which they have refused to do since last June. Just as it is wrong to pit doctors against patients, it is also wrong for the Labour party to pit the Government against doctors. In the previous Parliament, Labour wanted to cut the NHS budget, but we protected it. In May’s election we promised £5.5 billion more for the NHS than Labour did, and in the last Parliament a Conservative-led Government delivered 9,000 more doctors to the NHS, 1 million more operations a year, and 600,000 more people were referred for urgent suspected cancer every year.

Because we are not stopping at that, and because we are passionate that the NHS should offer the highest standards of care available anywhere in the world, the Government have also been honest about the problems facing the NHS. Two hundred avoidable deaths every week is too many—it is the equivalent of a plane crash every week. Nor is it acceptable that twice a week we operate on the wrong part of someone’s body, or allow other “never events” to happen. In many of those areas the NHS is performing at or better than international norms, but that does not make such things any more acceptable. We want the NHS to be the first healthcare system in the world to adopt standards of safety that are considered normal in the airline, nuclear or oil industries.