Health Secretary Andy Burnham announced that the days of NHS junior doctors working 80 hour weeks have gone for good and that the “overwhelming majority” of junior doctor rotas will comply with the European working time directive by 1 August.
Due to the fact that the NHS is seriously understaffed it means that junior hospital doctors are working an 80-hour week often unsupervised. It is believed that scrapping this system will be a long-awaited boost to their morale. One reason that the system was reviewed was because of the number of reports of serious, potentially fatal, mistakes or near-misses, made while coping alone and exhausted on a ward late at night and their consultant bosses were tucked up in bed.
This is made worse when junior doctors complain to their consultants about the excruciatingly long hours, the clerical work, the endless list of minor tasks are still told: ‘We did it, so can you.’ Do consultants not realise that things are changing all the time? The number of staff has decreased due to the economic climate meaning that jobs have been cut and the amount of paperwork has increased due to various policies put in place by those higher up the ladder, some are a result of Government policy and others are a result of media coverage of errors in practice.