BMA council chair: 'Rise above provocations'

BMA council chair Mark Porter has called on doctors to remain united and focused on achieving positive change, in a rousing speech to the 2016 special representative meeting. Dr Porter (pictured above, far left) urged all members of his profession not to lose hope or determination in the struggle for a stronger health service, in an impassioned address to the BMA SRM today. He added that doctors owed it not only to themselves but to patients to ‘rise above the many provocations’ in order to take the NHS forward. He said: ‘We must believe that we can make British medicine better and our health service better. It needs our hope as much as it needs our effort. It has never needed our hope more than now. ‘For junior doctors, it’s the hope that a damaging and arbitrary contract will not be forced upon them. For staff, associate specialist and specialty doctors, it’s to be treated as the senior, integral part of the workforce that their skills have always merited. ‘For consultants, it’s that contractual safeguards will not be ripped up in the service of keeping an unkeepable promise that seven-day services can be fully delivered without any extra staff or resources. ‘For medical students, it’s the hope that the values and the enthusiasm they bring to medicine will not be cynically squandered.’   Challenges and threats The extraordinary meeting has been called in response to the series of unprecedented challen...
Source: BMA News - Category: UK Health Source Type: news