20 Jul Striking doctors do not care about public sympathy, says former BMA chairman
STRIKING consultants and junior doctors have reached a “point of no return” and no longer care about public sympathy, according to the former chairman of the BMA’s GPs committee.
Dr Laurence Buckman told GB News: “I think you reach a point where you stop worrying about public sympathy and I think the consultants and the juniors have got to that point.
“When you’re desperate, when you feel the NHS is crumbling around your ears, you start to feel that, actually, ‘I would like the general public to come with me but if they don’t, well, okay’.
“The consultants are now so desperate and the juniors too in a completely different way that I think I think they can’t see that they really have got to get round the table with the political centre.”
In a discussion with Andrew Pierce and Bev Turner, he continued: “Now it’s reached a point where people almost don’t care.
“They care about their patients, so the patient in front of them matters as much as it ever did, but they can’t do the things they want to do for that patient in the room with them. And as for the wider public, I think they’ve reached a point of no return now.
“The doctors and nurses now almost care more about keeping the health service going in some way than they do about how it will look if they strike. That’s a very dangerous point to reach.”
He added: “They care about the one in the room. I always care about the patient who is with me, much more than the broader brush of general practice. And the same applies to hospital doctors.
“They don’t see it as their responsibility to worry about patients in the wider context because they believe that the health service needs so much of a shake up and it’s not going to happen.”
