Crickey. The Israel Medical Association has raised the bar on what professional representatives should be prepared to do to draw attention to the plight of their members.
Or at least its chairman has. He’s just completed a 12-day hunger strike in a bid to secure better pay, work conditions and funding for the country’s public doctors.
I can think of a couple of consultants’ representatives in the UK who could kill two birds with one stone through a hunger strike. Or several stones depending on their will power. But not Dr Hamish Meldrum, the slender chair of BMA council - he really doesn’t have the stomach for it.
What next? Will we see HCSA council members donning their superhero costumes and occupying the roof of Buck Palace? Go on, dare you. You’d be the talk of The Athenaeum.
Joking aside, something extra is needed though.
By the BMA’s own admission, when it comes to protecting doctors’ pensions - the BIG issue for many - the government just aren’t listening.
Although the government is yet to announce its response to the Hutton Report on public sector pensions, it has already changed the way that the NHS pension scheme tracks inflation. The scheme now follows the Consumer Prices Index instead of the Retail Prices Index which will mean NHS pension increase by less per year.
And, even if it doesn’t replace the final salary pension scheme for hospital doctors with a career average earnings scheme, like it’s threatening to do, the government is already proposing to massively increase doctors’ pension contributions (despite the scheme being in surplus).
Every couple of years, a few medical firebrands get animated at the annual representatives meeting, or in an online forum, about a reform and start calling for industrial action. The rest of the profession nod indulgently, publicly empathising over the issue but privately knowing they would never man the barricades and compromise their patients.
This time it feels a bit different however. There’s the massive, top-down reform of the NHS, no annual pay rises for the foreseeable future, cuts, probable scrapping of Clinical Excellence Awards, and now compromise of the NHS pension scheme - the one thing doctors hold on to when times are bad and console themselves that at least they’ll have a decent retirement.
Taken together they constitute an assault on the profession. And the current conversation doesn’t seem to be progressing the profession’s cause. Batman and Robin anybody?
Tags: Pensions
Frustrating ‘yes’ - but we don’t do strikes, for good reasons.
In memory of Lady Godiva, the first recorded tax protestor I understand that Stephen Campion, CEO of the HCSA, has agreed to ride naked through the streets of Coventry, his modesty protected only by his long flowing locks!
That should scare them into submission.
The BMA must tell those still working for the NHS by how much they should reduce their present output/performance/hours to compensate for lost pensions.
I am sure that most still do at least 10% more that is contracted for, so there is room for reduction without industrial action of any kind.