Jersey doctor singing for NHS survival

Thursday 14 January 2016

A Jersey trainee doctor working in the UK has come up with the best medicine to help support her NHS colleagues campaigning against changes to their contracts.

Dr Julia Patterson, a 30-year-old psychiatry trainee, is the voice behind the National Health Singers' album 'Yours' - which is helping to fund the campaign against the government's plans to force through changes to junior doctors' contracts.

She's been a junior doctor for the last five years, and is one of the founders of the NHS Choir – the group that’s been singing at picket lines all over London this week.

Dr Patterson said: “Myself and Dr George Wood decided in October to form a national choir of NHS staff to create an NHS anthem, to sing in support of the junior doctors who are being targeted and vilified by the government currently.

“The government is seeking to impose a job contract to all doctors other than consultants and GPs. This contract is unsafe for patients and unfair to doctors. Currently we work long hours, often 12 shifts in a row without a day off, and work long sets of night-shifts and weekends.

“However the NHS trusts we work for have a limit to have many hours they can schedule us to work. If they schedule us to work more hours than this, the NHS trust is fined. The new contract will remove this safeguard, leading to exhausted doctors and putting patients at risk.

“This is a very real worry of ours; NHS trusts regularly try to push junior doctors to work as many hours as they can under the current scheme, as money is very short currently. The current safeguards are protecting the public from the doctors becoming too exhausted and making mistakes.

“Music is a powerful way of communicating, and we wanted to be able to sing our song at protests/rallies/on the news etc as a way of getting our message across.”

The former JCG student is 37 and a half weeks’ pregnant so wasn’t out with her choir singing on the picket lines on Tuesday outside Great Ormond Street Hospital, South Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Hospital, University College Hospital, Whittington and The Royal London but she knows all too well the pressures on junior doctors.

She said: "I love my job; I work in central London caring for acutely unwell psychiatric patients. It is an extremely challenging and rewarding job, and I wouldn't want to do anything else.

"There is enormous pressure on the NHS currently, and all its staff. The workload increases year on year, and everyone is stretched to breaking point. The morale in the NHS is very low because of this; there are high levels of stress. We all feel however that the NHS is a wonderful institution and would be devastated if the NHS was lost.

Dr Patterson says there are big plans for the National Health Choir who are now tuned in to the concerns of other NHS colleagues too.

She said: “We feel the change to junior doctor contracts is the first in a series of government proposals which seek to dismantle the NHS and privatise services. The government has now begun attacking the student nurses by seeking to take away their student bursaries. We have widened our cause to help support all NHS staff during this difficult time.

"We have begun to support other staff groups in the NHS as they are attacked by the government. We participated in the student nurse bursary rally in London on Saturday 9th January to show our support in defending the cuts to student nurse bursaries. We will continue to sing our song at events all over the country to support junior doctors and raise public awareness (we now have ten regional choirs nationally).

“We are creating new material and will continue to work within the campaign to save the NHS and support junior doctors to prevent this dangerous contract from being imposed."

All the profits from 'Yours' are being donated to medical charities and to fund the campaign to support junior doctors in resisting the new junior doctor contracts. You can buy the single via iTunes, amazon and google play and you can find all the links you’ll need on the choir’s website here.