Last August, the European Working Time Directive – Europe’s 48-hour working week law – was imported to the UK fresh from Brussels and fully mandated in hospitals for the first time.
The 48-hour week is proving a difficult hurdle to jump for doctors in the NHS – particularly those in training.
Prior to August, doctors were granted an opt-out from the 48-hour week in the light of their unpredictable working hours. But back in April, Labour voted to scrap the opt out and allow the law to be enforced across the UK.
It is of course absolutely vital to ensure that NHS doctors are not overworked and that their weekly routine is manageable. Not only do they play an integral role in both our health service and our society, patient care is bound to suffer if our doctors are overworked, stressed and dissatisfied.
But in promoting a 48-hour week as the solution to this problem, we neatly sidestep the fact that illness, disease and medical emergencies can rarely be fitted into the rigidity of a standard working week; an hour of a doctor’s time, even when he is tired, might mean the difference between life and death for a patient.
Doctors frequently go the extra mile for patients as a result of their professionalism, individual stamina, adrenalin and their love of the job.
Many in the medical community fear that by importing a one-size-fits-all law from across the Channel, the Government are going to lose the ability to listen to doctors’ and patients’ preferences and concerns and adapt the NHS accordingly.
One particular area of concern is junior doctors’ training. The Government has provided the NHS with little or no extra resources to deal with the new 48-hour week. Coventry and Warwickshire University Hospital NHS Trust, for example, estimated a reduction of 944 hours of doctors’ training as a result of the EWTD.
Not only is this unfair on junior doctors who will not be able to gain the same exposure and hands-on training as they had anticipated, it is also detrimental to patient care in the long-term: if doctors receive inadequate training then the standard of care that patients receive can only be adversely affected.
The Government may come to regret the fact that they did not press for a tailor-made solution for doctors through home-grown legislation; instead, the only option for the NHS has been to accept the off-the-shelf alternative from across the Channel.
While the uptake of the EWTD in the NHS has gone ahead this August, it has done so in an atmosphere of growing discord: there exists an underlying unease about whether the Working Time Directive will turn out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, promising freedom from a distance but in reality prohibiting it.
In our European Manifesto, the Conservatives have promised that a major goal of the next Conservative Government will be the return of social and employment legislation to British national control. The Working Time Directive has a direct impact on the workforce and the quality of training, quality, productivity and motivation of our professionals within the NHS.
We cannot allow Labour, as one of its political death-throes, to force our doctors to suffer being dictated to by this blunt Directive which has never had the needs of patients in our NHS in its thinking, let alone at its heart.
For the good of patients, doctors and all who want to give the highest quality care, we will need to secure a more flexible and individually tailored approach for the NHS. But are Labour doing everything they can to thwart us? It would seem so.
Comment by Simon on October 2, 2009 at 4:54 pm
It should be up to the individual to decide whether they want to work 40, 100 or 120 hours , not some unelected jobsworth in Brussels. It is, however, pointless pontificating about it when Cameron seems hellbent on denying us a referendum on Lisbon and handing over power to the nameless jobsworth.
PS why do you need such a long and stupid caption to be filled in in order to post this? V irritating.