Tom Dolphin 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️

New online hospital must pay attention to needs of patients, says BMA - BMA media centre - BMA Press release from the BMA

"We want to be assured that no one will be left behind in this new online hospital"

Our Chair of Council @tomdolphin.bsky.social responds to the Government's announcement www.bma.org.uk/bma-media-ce...

An image shows doctors wearing BMA orange at a rally. The text says "We're 200,000 members strong"

The BMA is now 200,000 members strong - and counting.

Commenting, council chair @tomdolphin.bsky.social said: "Together we are all the BMA, and alongside our brilliant staff, the members are what give the BMA its voice and strength."

Read more: www.bma.org.uk/news-and-opi...

Sasjkia Otto hosting the panel with the four of us sitting in front of various Fabians/RCN/BMA backdrops. A low table in front of us holds water glasses and various pieces of paper and microphones.

Sasjkia Otto hosting the panel with the four of us sitting in front of various Fabians/RCN/BMA backdrops. A low table in front of us holds water glasses and various pieces of paper and microphones.

Pleasure to do this great panel hosted by @thefabians.bsky.social along w Nicola Rayner (@rcn.org.uk) and @kevinmckenna.co.uk
We covered workforce planning (lacking), AI in healthcare (unready) and how to get from here to the 10 Year Health Plan’s end points (unclear but may be for us to determine)

A pleasure to chair @bma.org.uk Resident Doctors Committee meeting today for the elections section. Congratulations to the new officer team, and thank you and well done to the outgoing team, who worked incredibly hard this last year for members. The fight to restore our pay continues!

Reform immigration announcement will cause anxiety and distress to much-needed international health workforce, says BMA - BMA media centre - BMA Press release from the BMA

“This announcement will cause a great deal of anxiety and distress to our much-needed and valued international workforce, including international doctors, who are the backbone of the health services in the UK" @tomdolphin.bsky.social

Read our response in full www.bma.org.uk/bma-media-ce...

"A speaker in a white shirt stands at a podium with two microphones, delivering a speech at the BMA SRM 2025 event. The blue backdrop features the BMA logo and 'SRM 2025'. The image includes a quote from Dr Tom Dolphin, BMA Chair of Council: 'A spiralling crisis and a disjointed health service which demands a solution. So a long-term plan for the NHS is not just appealing but is essential.

"A spiralling crisis and a disjointed health service which demands a solution. So a long-term plan for the NHS is not just appealing but is essential.”

@tomdolphin.bsky.social delivers keynote speech at #SRM25, where our members will debate if this plan is the solution to the NHS in crisis.

"When you make a big change, it requires investment... We need more detail about how we're going to get from here to there" @tomdolphin.bsky.social spoke to BBC Breakfast this morning ahead of #SRM25, where our members will debate the NHS England 10-Year Health Plan
www.bma.org.uk/what-we-do/s...

Tomorrow’s special representative meeting / conference hopes to tease out a bit of the detail but a lot is not yet known

It’s moved things further than you might think. The aim is for a radical GMS contract renegotiation to deal with the issues that have built up, but will need investment in GP (which the 10YHP includes, although unclear if shifting money from hospitals and if so, how not to destabilise them)

GPs in England did so last year; it has been considered elsewhere – different governments are in different places and the BMA tailors its approach to the situation in each nation

Boris Johnson says these are just common sense and reasonable statements

News Letter 6 September 2025 Trans lobby 'co-design' role in clinic criticsed.

By David Thompson newsdesk@newsletter.co.uk @News_Letter The influence given to LGBTQ+ lobby groups by the health minister Mike Nesbitt in the design of a controversial gender identity service has been branded “reckless, dangerous” and contradictory to the expert warnings of the Cass Review. The Christian Institute says that Northern Ireland is “running towards the same disaster” that happened in England around gender services for children by allowing groups such as the Rainbow Project a role in the design of a gender identity clinic. The Department of Health (DoH) says “service users” were just one element of the “co-design” of the new service – but the review was “steered by expert clinicians”. #TransAgendaClips

The 'trans lobby' here is trans people and their families who were - shock horror - consulted about trans health care.

David Thompson writes that consulting trans groups is "contradictory to the expert warnings of the Cass Review".

Quick update on a few other things to end the day:
Our NHS colleagues are angry;
Residents in England are making some progress in talks;
GPs in NI are acting collectively;
@bma-ni.bsky.social are in dispute over unpaid uplifts; and
@BMAstudents have a win on student funding.

Have a good weekend!

Doctors know we need nationally-set scope for PAs and AAs. Local scope will mean local scope creep, without a doubt - we're already seeing it happening. It's not fair on them and it's not fair on patients or the supervising doctors.

So why is no-one taking this responsibility?

UK news Father Ted creator Graham Linehan arrested over posts on transgender issues Comedy writer intercepted by five armed officers at Heathrow after flying in from Arizona Caroline Davies and Dan Milmo Tue 2 Sep 2025 14.29 BST & Share The writer of TV's Father Ted has been arrested at Heathrow over three social media posts on transgender issues.

To reiterate;

This is how the Guardian describes a tweet that advocates assaulting trans women;

“Posts on transgender issues”

Oh god yes, not defending ChatGPT; you’d be lucky if it even managed to summarise without inserting a hallucinated extra character in there …

To be clear, I’m not defending ChatGPT at all; I agree it’s a planet destroying plagiarism machine. I’m just saying, everything - every book on any topic - is to some degree a summary. No book is a complete description of its subject any more than a map can ever be more than an approximation.

Is it reasonable to ask someone to devote 4-6 hours to reading an entire book on a subject they have only a passing interest in, to inform a debate with a stranger online they’ll probably never interact with again? Summaries are helpful; everything is a summary, even Gibbons’ Decline and Fall…

The BMA and many others warned that this was coming, and now it is here. The UK government must act immediately to prevent widespread death in Gaza from hunger. This is entirely man-made and is intolerable.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/ck...

Version 1 of email: "Are you insane" Subscribe Version 8 of email: "If someone is instructing you to continue using this process I would be happy to advocate for you."

Duolingo screenshot of a French lesson where you are asked to translate “I wanted to participate in the strike” into French - « J’ai voulu participer à la grève » Under my correct answer Duo posted a green tick and the words “Good job!”, which by coincidence is what can follow from union membership

Well, @duolingoverde.bsky.social knows where it’s at ✊

Ensemble nous sommes plus forts; ensemble nous gagnerons!

Doctors take on huge responsibilities from day one, as @tomdolphin.bsky.social set out to Trevor Phillips today.

We’re asking the Government for a credible path to #PayRestoration for resident doctors in England

Great to speak to the new F1 resident doctors at my Trust today about the role of trade unions in correcting the huge power imbalance between employer and employee, and some of the professional work we are doing as well. Most already @bma.org.uk members, but lots of new signups too! ✊

Graduands wearing their BL hoods going into the north entrance of St Paul’s

St Paul’s cathedral central rotunda with graduands and their families taking their seats

The west entrance door to St Paul’s

Honoured to be at the Barts and The London Rites of Passage ceremony 2025 tonight - St Paul’s provides a magnificent backdrop for this key moment in the careers of these new doctors. 🖤🤍

Resident doctors will be striking in England this time next week. I will be joining them on the picket line in support. The Secretary of State can end the dispute if he has the will to do so. @bma.org.uk remain open to further proposals after yesterday’s constructive talks.

“The trouble is the review… avoids the difficult question of how you set that scope, that limit of what PAs can do.”

Responding to the Leng Review, BMA council chair @tomdolphin.bsky.social has spoken to the BBC about doctors’ concerns over patient safety

There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc. There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation. There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely. Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time. For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual. As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.

So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone. Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism. No, it a’n’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get: The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

I think it's now possible to make a poli-sci course that equips one for modern political analysis better than most classic theory and has a syllabus sourced entirely from random internet posts.

Text 1. Wilhoit's Law, born as part of a 2018 blog comment
crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/l...

Dolphin blamed the five-day strike that tens of thousands of resident doctors plan to stage later this month on Wes Streeting, the health secretary, giving them a 22% pay rise over two years last year but not following it up with an award this year to take account of the 29% claim. He said the disruption that the 120-hour walkout would cause was his fault, not theirs. Dolphin said: “Our expectation was that the [22%] would be the start of a journey that would keep us going until we’d reached the value we had in 2008. So, clearly, the return of value has stopped and now it’s just marching on the spot. And we need to carry on that journey.

BMA council chair @tomdolphin.bsky.social has spoken to the Guardian on why the Government must set out a credible path to pay restoration for resident doctors in England.

Read the article here 👇🔗 www.theguardian.com/society/2025... #PayRestoration

The Distracted Boyfriend meme: the boyfriend “You” is distracted from girlfriend “Strike Locum” by the passing girl “Full Pay Restoration”

Are you a resident thinking about taking a locum shift on a strike day?

Why risk actively undermining the strike, when you could just wait for your back pay from Wes’ pay award (such as it is) to arrive in August? 😇

BMA press release

"The Government and NHS England both state today that the modest [waiting list] improvements we’ve seen so far are down to staff’s hard work. They now need to demonstrate this with more than words and commit to restoring doctors’ pay and value."

Full response: www.bma.org.uk/bma-media-ce...