Consultants vote against automatic ballot on new contract

Consultants have voted against automatically holding a collective ballot of consultants and senior trainees on a new contract.

Instead, consultants could decide individually whether they wish to accept the new contract or remain on the existing consultant contract. Likewise, senior trainees, once they became consultants, could choose between the 2003 consultant contract and the new contract.

At the BMA’s consultants’ conference in London on Tuesday 28 February, delegates voted against a motion calling on the association’s Consultants Committee to neither approve nor accept any new contract “without balloting appropriate branches of the BMA membership.”

In his opening speech to the conference, Keith Brent, chair of the committee, said, “A scenario has arisen whereby the best possible terms for both present and …