Former Tory health minister attacks new junior doctor contract

A former Conservative health minister has delivered a scathing attack on the government’s handling of the new contract for UK junior doctors.

Writing in the Guardian newspaper, Dan Poulter said that the junior doctor contract that the Department of Health for England now wanted to impose was very different from the one being discussed last year when he was overseeing the coalition government’s negotiations over the new contracts for doctors.1

Poulter, who is still a Conservative MP, said that there was no talk then of 90 hour weeks or of cuts to junior doctors’ pay. Instead there was recognition …