Wes Streeting kept his word. One of the first phone calls he made the day after Labour won its landslide victory in July was to the doctors’ union, the British Medical Association (BMA). Within a few weeks he had negotiated a deal that looks likely to end the long-running junior doctors’ dispute in England. On 1 August GPs began their own work-to-rule industrial action, in which doctors are reducing some services or capping the number of patients seen each day. Despite apparently constructive talks with Dr Katie Bramall-Stainer, chair of the BMA’s GP committee, a resolution to this dispute seems further off. Streeting will argue that he does not have the resources immediately available to reverse a decade of underfunding and neglect of primary care. But he is strongly signalling his desire to “reset” the relationship between government and the medical profession to one of collaboration rather than conflict.
To achieve this reset, the Health Secretary will have to confront the fundamental crisis engulfing the medical world – a crisis that won’t be fixed by upping pay or magicking measures to render workloads manageable again, and about which he has been largely silent to date. The drums of discontent have been sounding with escalating tempo and volume for the past year, and a state of war has ostensibly now broken out between grassroots doctors and the medico-political establishment.
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