Cancelled operations sees elderly feel pain of doctors’ strike

During the unrest, what should patients do?

This will include Tuesday, January 12, when striking doctors will provide emergency care only for 24-hours from 8am, followed by another 48-hour period of emergency care only from 8am on Tuesday, January 26.

“Our priority first and foremost during any disruption is to protect our vital emergency and urgent care services”.

In February, they will stage a total walkout between 0800 and 1700, leaving senior colleagues, locums and nurses to fill the gaps. Junior doctors will be covering emergency services the rest of the wards will be covered by consultants. Others will be largely unaffected. But it stressed that in the event of an emergency, people should call 999 or go directly to A&E.

Don’t be anxious that Accident and Emergency care will less effective during the strike.

Junior doctors say have no choice but to launch the actions in protest over new working conditions in their contracts that they say will put patients “lives at risk” by overworking doctors and leaving them prone to tiredness and mistakes.

The BMA insisted it was apolitical, adding: “The call for industrial action was made by junior doctors themselves, with 98 per cent voting in favour”.

“Junior doctors are the backbone of the NHS, working long and anti-social hours”.

Junior medics from Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals Trust, which runs Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton and the Princess Royal Hospital in Haywards Heath said appointments will go ahead as planned unless patients have been contacted.

Will GP surgeries still be open?

“But we also have to be honest that hospitals are stretched at the moment, There are some hospitals that have large numbers of vacancies”, he said. You will have been notified if this applies to you.

22 operations and 247 outpatient clinic appointments cancelled.

Have you been affected by the strike?

“If a planned operation needs to be cancelled the patient will be contacted directly by the department concerned”.

The 24-hour strike in England, planned to start at 8am, comes after the Government’s “continued failure to address junior doctors’ concerns”, according to the British Medical Association (BMA). There are more than 40,000 consultants and 10,000 staff doctors, not to mention locums, that could be brought in.

This morning, the BMA hit back at Whitehall’s position by suggesting junior doctors could not have confidence in a government which “has been deliberately turning up the temperature behind the scenes in order to misrepresent them”.

Mr Corbyn told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: “We should recognise that junior doctors are qualified, extremely hard-working, deserve to be treated properly and (Health Secretary) Jeremy Hunt should now come to an agreement with them”.

Medical director Dr George Findlay said: “We have taken the decision to postpone a small number of appointments and procedures to ensure we can maintain our normal standards of patient safety during the industrial action”. Patients needing emergency treatment and women in labour should attend as normal.