PATIENTS being treated at weekends in Taunton’s Musgrove Park Hospital always have and always will receive first rate care, a leading consultant said this week.

Spinal surgeon Paul Thorpe was reacting to Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s attempts to force NHS consultants to work seven day weeks and to crack down on overtime pay.

Mr Thorpe and his on-call colleagues posed for a photo at Musgrove last Saturday and Tweeted ‘We’re in work Jeremy’ to emphasise their commitment to providing emergency weekend cover.

He said: “I’d come into work on the Monday at 8am and was on call all week until the following Monday.

“I work 56 hours a week, but that becomes 168 hours every fourth week when I’m on call.

“If something happens, I’m in.

“Sometimes I don’t get a call, other times I’ll get two calls and the next day I’ve still got to do clinics and lists.”

Mr Thorpe said consultants carry out elective work such as routine hip or knee replacements during Monday to Friday ‘office hours’, with emergency work covered by on call staff in the evenings and weekends.

He said: “Jeremy Hunt’s view is that operating theatres and MRI scanners are lying fallow at weekends and their usage could be increased.

“But the Government don’t want to pay for it – he wants the NHS to become a seven day service with staff and surgeons coming in at weekends for elective work.

“But what Jeremy Hunt says is flawed – there are lots of consultants here to look after you, always have been and always will be.”

Mr Thorpe, who was involved in drawing up the existing contract in 2003, said Mr Hunt’s use of statistics showing hospital patients are more likely to die at weekends was a “smokescreen” because the proportion of emergency and sick patients automatically rises on Saturdays and Sundays.

“Part of what we do is to drive quality, efficiency and safety of health care,” added Mr Thorpe, who earns a basic salary of £90,000, which he says is justified by his years of studying and training and the fact he has “people’s lives in my hands”.

“If the Government wants to work with us, that is often successful.

“If they want to vilify us by suggesting we’re lazy and overpaid and not in the hospital – that’s what gets our goat.”

Mr Hunt said: “It is incredibly inefficient to have a service that cranks up on a Monday morning and starts to wind down after lunch on a Friday.”

He added: “Around 6,000 people lose their lives every year because we do not have a proper seven-day service in hospitals.

“No one could possibly say that this was a system built around the needs of patients.”