Part of Opposition Day — [8th allotted day] – in the House of Commons at 5:11 pm on 28 October 2015.
I agree.
Since coming here, I have heard stories of people unable to access diagnostic imaging or to work up patients, but there is no argument about that from the profession. That is what we need to focus on, yet a lot of this seems to be about routine. There are fewer doctors at weekends because we do not do routine work. We have teams of people doing toenail and blood pressure clinics in the week. Professor Jane Dacre estimates that doing those at weekends would require 40% more doctors. We cannot do that. We need to make sure that hospitals at weekends have enough people and the right people to be secure, but junior doctors are already there—it is not they who are missing—and emergency services already have a consultant on call. We might need more discussion about their being physically in, but that is a discussion to have with the profession, whereas what we heard on