Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:22 pm on 11 July 2017.
Thank you. To be fair, it’s an issue that is regularly raised with me by both the royal college and the BMA as well. What I think is helpful and, again, different, and partly what gives us an opportunity, is that we do have a different relationship compared to other parts of the UK. It’s a much more adversarial relationship across our border. That is a point that is regularly raised by junior doctors themselves. The challenge is how we capitalise on that and actually take proper advantage of it and encourage people to come here to work and to stay, and, equally, they don’t simply say that, because I’m not Jeremy Hunt, that means everything is fine, because there are very real challenges. The report again recognises some of the opportunities that exist about e-rostering, about giving people different choices about how to manage their own life, where people often have other responsibilities, and not just their work, as well. Again, you talked about ‘in your day’. I hesitate to say how long ago that might have been. But, in the past, people expected to work very long hours, and they accepted that that was what you had to do. Whereas, actually, now, whether there are men or women in the workforce, lots of people who acquire different responsibilities outside work—with families, in particular—make different choices. So, you don’t find doctors who are prepared to say, ‘Someone else will bring up my child while I’m in work for 80 hours a week’.
So, we do need to think properly about how we manage that, and the numbers of people we need in our workforce to make the whole system run. I recognise the point you make about the differing way in which health boards engage their junior doctors. That’s an issue that’s brought to me by stakeholders, and an issue that’s recognised within the service about improvements that they need to make as well—but also the point about study leave and how we think creatively about how we could do something around that that could make a real difference to whether people choose to stay in the profession and in this country, too, as well.