A review of the junior doctor contract has been announced by the Department of Health.
It is widely agreed that the New Deal contract introduced in 2000 no longer reflects the working lives of juniors following the introduction of Modernising Medical Careers and the staged implementation of the European Working Time Directive.
Pressure group Remedy UK is calling for juniors to be employed on a single contract for the duration of their training programme. A system of having a single, lead employer has already been successfully adopted in a few programmes, it says.
Dr Richard Marks, head of policy at Remedy, claimed the current process of having separate contracts with individual trusts on each leg of the rotation creates problems for doctors applying for mortgages or credit, arranging maternity leave or out-of-programme time, maintaining pension contributions or managing sick leave and disciplinary matters. It also results in greater scope for mistakes on tax codes and seniority levels and repeated pre-employment checks.
Remedy would also like to see the corporate status of deaneries more clearly defined. “We believe that they are employment agencies and should be covered by employment agency legislation yet this could preclude them from their educational role,” said Marks.
A third demand is for greater clarity over the DoH’s Gold Guide, which describes the arrangements for postgrade medical training in the UK. Marks questioned whether this is a ‘guide’ to postgraduate specialty training or an integral part of juniors’ terms and conditions of employment. “Opinions on this change from day to day,” he said.
Remedy also insists that a new contract should reflect the individual opt-out of the Working Time Directive especially in the craft specialties.
Dr Tom Dolphin, vice chair of the BMA Junior Doctors Committee, said the union will be canvassing the views of juniors about what they would like to see in a new contract. ”The old contract was designed to reduce the hours we were working so we can now move on to the other things that our contract should do,” he said.
JDC chair Dr Andy Thornley pointed out that the DoH has only announced a ‘scoping study’ of the effectiveness of the existing contract and has not yet given NHS Employers and the other UK health departments a remit to start negotiations with the BMA.
But he said: “We need a contract that is fit for the NHS that we all work in today and I very much hope that this announcement signals the first step on the road to a new contract, something which the JDC has been calling for since 2004.”