Medics say they are desperate to avoid industrial action, as health secretary says patients could die if walkout goes ahead

Hundreds of junior doctors have called on Jeremy Hunt to avert industrial action after the health secretary said patients could die if next month’s planned strikes went ahead.

More than 600 junior doctors signed a letter to Hunt imploring him to enter into talks at the mediation service Acas to solve the dispute over changes to their pay and working hours. They said they had voted for strike action “with a very heavy heart”.

“We are desperate to avoid this,” they said in the letter, seen by the Guardian. “It goes against our very ethos.”

The doctors’ walkouts are scheduled for 1, 8 and 16 December, and Hunt said on Sunday that he could not rule out fatalities. “It is a very high-risk period for patients when doctors withdraw from providing emergency cover,” he told the Mail on Sunday.

He said he had the backing of David Cameron and George Osborne to face down the strike action, and claimed that the British Medical Association junior doctors leader, Johann Malawana, and some “militant” supporters were trying to turn the contract issue into “an ideological dispute when the truth is it is about improving patient care at weekends, nothing more, nothing less”.

The 648 junior doctors who signed the letter accused Hunt of being antagonistic and of using misleading statistics about the impact on patients of existing weekend working practices.

“If you truly want to prevent this [strike action], the power to do so is in your hands,” they said. “Equally the responsibility for not doing so will rest with you.”

Hunt wants to change doctors’ contracts to facilitate the creation of a truly seven-day-a-week NHS, but the BMA says the new contracts will lead to doctors working dangerously long hours.



A Department of Health spokesperson said: “We are not ruling out conciliation. However, that process should follow meaningful talks. In the first instance, and in advance of anything else, we are clear that we want the BMA to come back to the table to negotiate.”

Hunt earlier said resistance to working more over weekends was akin to passenger planes taking off without co-pilots because it was the weekend. He said doctors could face being sanctioned by the General Medical Council if they failed to ensure there were safe arrangements in place for patient care if they withdraw their labour.

He said: “The GMC guidance is very clear: doctors should satisfy themselves individually that there are safe arrangements in place for patients if they withdraw labour.”

A spokesman for the BMA said: “The decision to take industrial action was not taken by a small group of people: it was a course of action voted for by 28,000 junior doctors, 98% of those balloted on a turnout of 76% of our membership.

“We regret the inevitable disruption that this will cause but it is the government’s adamant insistence on imposing a contract that is unsafe for patients in the future, and unfair for doctors now, that has brought us to this point. Rather than attacking junior doctors, the secretary of state should be taking up the BMA’s offer to discuss how we resolve this dispute through Acas. It was disappointing that he appears already to have rejected this already.”

Doctors are worried that the new contract will greatly extend the hours in any week for which they are paid basic rates of pay – from the current finish time of 7pm on weekdays to 10pm and, crucially, including Saturday until 7pm for the first time.



They are also concerned safeguards that prevent hospitals from forcing them to work dangerously long hours, and the current banding system that dictates how much they are paid, especially in overtime, will disappear.