GPs are being offered up to £200 per hour – at least double the normal going rate – to work in A&E departments during this week’s junior doctors’ strike, with hospital bosses fearing the unprecedented walk-out will cost lives.
With many consultants unavailable to cover, NHS managers have been left scrambling to find enough staff for critical areas and have appealed to GPs – many of them already under fire themselves for being unavailable to their own patients – to help out in hospitals.
It has led to some hospital trusts in London offering to pay each GP up to £2,400 for one 12-hour shift – twice that of normal locum rates.
Up to 47,600 junior doctors – around half the NHS’s medical workforce – plan to walk out for four days from 7am on Tuesday, in their bid for a 35 per cent pay rise.
The dates have been chosen by the British Medical Association (BMA), the doctors’ trade union, to cause maximum disruption.
Up to 47,600 junior doctors – around half the NHS’s medical workforce – plan to walk out for four days from 7am on Tuesday, in their bid for a 35 per cent pay rise. Pictured: Picket line outside St Thomas’ Hospital in Westminster in London, March 13
Book-ended by the Easter bank holiday period and next weekend, the walk-out is expected to lead to a total of ten days of misery at hospitals, clinics and nursing homes.
Health chiefs predicted yesterday that up to a quarter of a million medical appointments and operations could be postponed.
And death registration, already subject to big backlogs, is expected to take a ‘catastrophic’ hit, meaning bereaved families could be waiting months to hold funerals.
The Department of Health and Social Care has said the BMA has to call off the strike before any negotiations can take place.
Last night, NHS medical director Professor Sir Stephen Powis said the action is going to cause ‘unparalleled’ disruption with a potentially ‘serious impact’ on patients.
He warned of ‘hospitals facing nearly 100 hours without up to half of the NHS medical workforce’.
Prof Powis said hospitals will prioritise emergency, critical, trauma care, maternity and neonatal care, but the strikes ‘inevitably mean hundreds of thousands of appointments will need to be postponed again, including in cancer care’.
Hard-Left strike organisers have long had such chaos in mind, according to discussions on an online junior doctors’ forum.
Refusing to staff A&Es during strikes would leave the Government ‘in a chokehold’, one said.
Another wrote: ‘Go [strike] hard or go home. F*** what the public thinks – they need us more than we need them. It’s not like they have any other choice for their emergency care.’
Last week, it was reported that almost six million people a month are giving up trying to see a GP due to long waits for an appointment (stock image)
Details of the offer to GPs were posted in an NHS WhatsApp message shared on Twitter. It read: ‘Local secondary trusts are working hard to identify senior colleagues to support with work rotas during this time.
‘In particular, they are keen to ask GP colleagues who are available without prior commitments to consider shifts at their local emergency departments. Trusts will pay up to £150/hour for daytime hours, £200/hour for night.’
The hospitals looking for GP fill-ins included Chelsea and Westminster, Charing Cross, St Mary’s and West Middlesex – all in London.
Last week, it was reported that almost six million people a month are giving up trying to see a GP due to long waits for an appointment.
Dr Layla McCay of the NHS Confederation, which represents health service leaders, said: ‘We believe up to 250,000 appointments will be cancelled.
‘The disruption will go on for ten or 11 days. We will see really significantly diminished capacity within the health service.
A Whitehall source said: ‘The strike poses a significant risk to patient safety and will endanger lives.’
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