Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:15 pm on 6 March 2018.
Can I thank the Cabinet Secretary for his statement on valuing the NHS workforce? Following on from Dawn Bowden about staff well-being, I was going to concentrate on junior hospital doctors and their continuing well-being, and ask specifically of the Cabinet Secretary what he is doing to address the concerns of junior hospital doctors in Wales today and to explore the culture of how their rotas are managed within our hospitals.
Obviously, there's been mention of 70 years of the NHS this year, and some of us have been working in the NHS for more than half that time, now, I shudder to think back. But anyway, back in the day, as junior hospital doctors, we worked in fixed firms—consultant, senior registrar, registrar, senior house officer or SHO and house officer. It was fixed, you had the same team day in, day out, and it was the same team for six months. There was no problem with rotas; we worked very hard—over 100 hours a week. There was no problem getting time off for study or exams and there was no problem getting time off to get married. Even the administrators were there all hours, helping us all out—one big happy family. Fast-forward to today and our juniors feel undervalued and unloved. They no longer work in fixed teams. Modernising medical careers has wrecked that firm and juniors now work with different people every day; they're not in a fixed team. Litigation has risen, they're held to blame, as individual errors, for systemic failures, when the gaps in the rota mean that they have to cover two or three and sometimes four or five wards on call. If something happens, it is automatically their fault and not the fact that there just weren't enough doctors around and they were having to cover multiple wards.
There is a schism between hospital administrators, particularly the ones who arrange the rotas—they're no longer part of the team, so juniors now have to battle to get time off for holidays, time off for study leave, time off to study for the exams that they need to progress in their careers, and even have to battle for time off to get married and have a honeymoon and things. Now, that wasn't the way it was; there's been a subtle change in culture. Juniors feel harassed, bullied and exploited and that's why they're leaving. So, in terms of valuing the NHS workforce, Cabinet Secretary, can I ask what you're doing specifically to address the concerns of junior hospital doctors in Wales today? Diolch yn fawr.