The BMA's annual representative meeting voted overwhelmingly to recommend acceptance of the new consultants' contract, despite impassioned pleas to the meeting by junior doctors that it would lead to greater control by managers and ruin family life.
Fiona Kew, a member of the BMA's council and junior doctors committee, said that she would have to walk away from the job if the new contract was approved.
“There is no doubt that there are some good things in this package. But I cannot accept that I will be forced to carry out routine duties in evenings and weekends,” she said.
“Medicine is the only job that I have ever wanted to do since I was 9 years old. But I have a husband and two small children.” With this new contract, she said, she would not be able to see them. “I cannot and will not compromise them,” she added.
Paul Thorpe, joint deputy chairman of the Junior Doctors Committee, said that whereas most professionals were aiming to decrease the hours they worked, the consultants were going in the opposite direction.
“This contract recognises all work as being on an equal basis between 8 am and 10 pm [weekdays] and between 9 am and 1 pm on Saturdays and Sundays.” He pointed out that after negotiations were complete, the health secretary, Alan Milburn, had told MPs that this contract “delivered the consultants for evening and weekend work.”
But Dr Peter Hawker, chairman of the Central Consultants and Specialists Committee, said that Mr Milburn had to “spin” the significance of the new contract, because he had to explain why he had failed to deliver on the government's original promise to ban new consultants from undertaking private work for the first seven years after being appointed a consultant (22 June, p 1473).
He pointed out that his employers currently had the right to tell him to work evenings and weekends, so the new contract did not change that situation. But his employers did not tell him to do so because, with the assistance of the BMA, he and his colleagues were able to negotiate with them. And that would be the case with the new contract.
“Without this new contract, consultant life now and over the next few years is going to become intolerable . . . Rejection of this contract would be one of the biggest disasters perpetrated on the consultant body over the last 30 years,” he added.
The motion to support the consultants' committee resolution recommending the proposed new consultant contract was passed overwhelmingly.