After
the rumours about junior doctors being screwed over by their employers,
there turned out to be some truth in the matter. Helen Bryden
was among the first doctors to speak
out
Scenario 1:
Faceless and unavailable
When our
salary banding was set at 1A instead of 2A—for a rota that was
only just compliant with 2A hours—I should have known things were
not going to go smoothly. We were appointed to a post advertised as
“attracting a 2A salary banding,” and the timing of our
disillusionment spoke
volumes.
Whistleblowing works
JOY
GORDON/PHOTONICA
The day before our much anticipated first payslip, we
received a brusque letter from a faceless person in the previously
unheard of human resources department of our trust. Reassured by our
consultant that this was a mistake, we set about contacting Mr Human
Resources, the originator of the letter. Neither the consultant, the
postgraduate tutor, nor myself had any success in the next three weeks.
On a day off, I phoned his office every hour and was very impressed by
the range of reasons given why he was out, busy, or otherwise
unavailable. The best I got was a letter from his
secretary.
Resolution
finally came after a chance meeting between Mr HR and our consultant,
both of whom attend rota based meetings. The added catalyst of BMA
intervention on our behalf oiled the wheels and the trust had to act.
We were made to jump through a couple of token monitoring
hoops—large hospital trusts are not programmed to apologise and
have done with it—and, in the fourth month of our six month post,
we were allocated the correct banding with back pay. Naturally, the
trust kept the interest it had been accruing on the eight salary
deficits.
Scenario 2: On
first name terms and very available
Having
heaved a sigh of relief and spent the back pay on outrageous
fripperies, I settled back into the niceties of being a junior doctor.
The eight of us were getting fairly slick by now, and the Christmas and
New Year rota was especially kind: we headed into January in good
spirits. Unfortunately, this was short lived: the trusts
monitoring exercise for the six months was upon us—better late
than never. We imagined we knew what to expect—after the earlier
round we had completed to get our banding corrected—but nothing
prepared us for what was to come.
As
soon as monitoring began, the trusts agenda became apparent. We
were to stick to contracted hours: no staying late to finish up, and
this was not negotiable. For five months we had been doing our jobs on
the wards, making clinical decisions, getting things done, and
generally trying to do the job to the best of our abilities. Lots of
people were all of a sudden acutely interested in what we did, and
specifically, what times we did it at. We met the bed manager, the
clinical nurse coordinator, and several members of the human resources
department—some with names and others
without.
As monitoring progressed
and we refused to be bullied—we were in favour of doing our jobs
safely and efficiently, rather than fulfilling the trusts wishes
on paper timesheets—things got more tense and heated exchanges
took place.
After four days of
intense harassment, despite the best efforts of our consultants to
shield us from events, and support us, we could take no more. We rang
the BMA for advice, and contacted the independent new deal support
group, and I became our
spokesperson.
I wrote to people I
had never heard of, sending a total of seven letters; shamelessly
pulling no punches, I named names and cited witnesses. We were not
going to put up with this harassment and blatant invalidation of the
monitoring exercise. Our story exposed such bizarre behaviour by
members of the trust that I was interviewed by the BMA News as
part of a feature on the new deal. This provoked further interest and
in the space of a few short days our story had appeared in the national
press and there had been a parliamentary question put to the Scottish
health minister regarding the trusts
behaviour.
Suddenly we had the
trusts undivided attention: it had a week to resolve the issue
to satisfy parliament. Amazingly, after that, I met Mr Faceless and
Unavailable from human resources, and we were soon on first name terms.
I was invited to meetings with the trust, and people would phone me to
check if I was available for them to come and see me. It was difficult
not to let this go to my head, especially when Mr Human Resources gave
me his mobile phone number so I could get back to him wherever he
was.
The issue was resolved to the
satisfaction of the trust and with reassurances that things would be
different next time. So far, my second preregistration house officer
post has passed uneventfully, despite it being with the same trust. I
look forward to the monitoring for this six months to see if it really
has mended its ways. I dont trust them an inch, but at least I
dont fear them
either.
Also see Ian Urmstons editorial this month about starting out on the right foot as a house officer.
