Your article (Critically ill patients ‘will inevitably die’ due to junior doctors’ strike, 4 April) is based on the views of three, admittedly eminent, cardiac doctors, but totally misses the point. Critically ill patients are dying every day because of the reckless underfunding of our health service by consecutive governments of whatever shade.
What the “junior” doctors – a phrase I despise to refer to individuals who have often dedicated 20-plus years to the health service – are trying to highlight is the dangerous staffing levels that the public are forced to experience in hospitals all over the UK, where patients with potential cancers wait for scans weeks beyond what they should have to, and the standard of care is, at best, barely tolerable. They are highlighting the fact that patients are dying needlessly every day.
And instead of criticising medics for highlighting these deficiencies, Dr Richard Grocott‑Mason, Dr Mark Mason and Dr Mario Petrou would be better served in addressing the deficiencies that the doctors’ industrial action is highlighting. Young doctors are exiting the health service in their droves. Senior consultants like myself are retiring early due to appalling working conditions, pay and pension taxation. The NHS is on life support that is about to be switched off, and no amount of platitudes by Grocott-Mason and his colleagues can disguise this.
The NHS is at a pivotal point in its history. Our patients can either listen to the siren voices of the London cardiologists or the young men and women who are prepared to put their careers at risk to highlight the deadly plight our patients face every single day.
Do not allow the Grocott-Masons of the medical hierarchy to deflect from the real truth. Without a major change in how we value our healthcare staff, the health system that we have taken for granted is as dead as those patients your headline refers to.
Dr Stephen Vallely
Retired consultant radiologist
