LETTERS to the EDITOR

How can more junior doctors’ strikes be justified when waiting lists are so long?

SIR – In recent years the British Medical Association has taken an increasingly militant approach in its demands for better pay and improved working conditions.

The recent 72-hour strike by junior doctors caused immense disruption to patients, many of whom have had their operations delayed for months. Now these doctors are proposing to strike for a further four days and calling for a 35 per cent wage increase (report, March 24).

This action will cause yet more suffering for patients. Such militancy does not sit well, and is surely in breach of the Hippocratic Oath.

Peter Stowe

Woodbridge, Suffolk

SIR – As a patient waiting for a diagnosis on a painful hip, and as a taxpayer, I feel the junior doctors’ demands would be reasonable only if, in return, we were to receive the sort of service provided 25 years ago: GP appointments on the day, drop-in A&E, ambulances within minutes and “elective” surgery in reasonable time.

BH Sherrad

Barton-on-sea, Hampshire

SIR – The junior doctors have a disagreement with their employers over how much they are paid.

They have, however, been unable to produce an argument sufficiently strong to persuade their employers to accede to their demands. As a result, they have chosen to vent their frustration by deliberately punishing their blameless, helpless patients.

That is appalling. I wouldn’t have been able to hold my head up if I had done that when I was a junior doctor. For goodness’ sake, get off your high horses, call off the strikes, sit round a table and sort out an agreement, as other NHS workers have done.

Dr DPB Pound

Daventry, Northamptonshire

SIR – I would be interested to know which tasks Richard Meddings, chairman of NHS England, feels new doctors are over-qualified to carry out (“Shorten training for doctors, says NHS chief ”, report, March 22). I suspect most are the result of pointless management initiatives.

A return to an apprentice model of training would be welcome. In the 1960s, when I qualified, we spent two years in academic study and the next three on the wards or in clinics, learning on the job. This also included the opportunity to act as a student locum for junior doctors.

Successive changes in the NHS, and the application of educational theory, gradually disrupted this system.

Mr Meddings clearly does not appreciate the complexity of diagnostic methods needed, particularly by GPS. The ability to identify the “black swans” of serious illness presenting early amid the mass of routine complaints requires a large breadth and depth of knowledge. Arguably, training should be longer rather than shorter.

Dr Robert Walker FRCPE

Workington, Cumbria