Jeremy Hunt opens the attack on the Working Time Directive

For years, Secretaries of State for Health have studiously ignored one of the most corrosive regulations to the NHS: the European Working Time Directive. Although the EU is not supposed to have any remit over health, this ‘health and safety’ directive limits junior doctors’ hours to an average of 48 hours per week, with added ECJ judgements imposing compulsory immediate compensatory rest time should hours be breached – and ‘on-call’ time classed as work, even if the doctor is fast asleep. This rigid imposition is neither healthy, nor safe; with junior doctors complaining that it has led them to do illicit work to get sufficient hours of training in, unpaid, less supervised, resulting in them being more tired and less trained.

It has resulted in more hand-overs (when vital patient information can get misinterpreted or misplaced), and lost the NHS approximately 400,000 hours of surgical time a month. The ECJ rulings on doctors having to take immediate compensatory rest if they go over their allotted hours has cancelled countless clinics as doctors have been ordered to rest instead of operating on patients ready and prepared for their surgery.