Sir, Junior hospital doctors are meant to be the crème de la crème of the young medical students and are certainly among the brightest science graduates.

They work long hours and weekends to train and provide the mainstay of treatment in the NHS on temporary contracts until their mid-thirties when they should become consultants. Their dedication is such that they work through lunch hours and after hours. Their salaries are now less than 50 per cent of that of the average GP.

But, as recently reported by the Royal College of Surgeons, there is an effective hiring freeze in hospitals so that, for example, 71 newly-qualified surgeons have not been able to find jobs as consultants and have become medically unemployed because they must, under government directive, find a consultancy job within six months of certification.

What a waste of human resources and long training, and so unfair. Just as the quality of UK universities has been undermined by years of low pay and bad conditions, so the same future is well under way for our hospitals as the haemorrhage of our brightest and most devoted doctors and nurses increases.

The Government was outmanoeuvred by the team of professional salary negotiators brought in by the GPs. But Patricia Hewitt refuses to admit this. Hospital doctors and nurses are paying immediately for the latest bout of managerial incompetence and micromismanagement that has led to an imbalance of resource allocation.

In the long run, we will have second-rate hospitals run by second-rate staff. No amount of measuring of blood pressure, cholesterol levels and prescription of statins, which appear to be Patricia Hewitt’s panacea, will make up for the lack of first-rate specialist hospital doctors.

Many dedicated professionals will put up with poor pay, but not the prospects of unemployment.

PROFESSOR SIR ALAN FERSHT
Cambridge

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