Juniors doctors have repeated their concern about the ability of the NHS to cope over the millennium holiday.

After a meeting with the health minister, Mr John Denham, the chairman of the Junior Doctors Committee, Mr Andrew Hobart, said, “The government has failed to demonstrate a real commitment to NHS staff. It has accepted the millennium holiday as a special time with special problems but has failed to realise that patients and staff caring for them deserve special arrangements too.”

Mr Hobart said that he doubted whether hospitals would be able to attract sufficient additional junior doctors to volunteer to work extra hours at derisory rates of pay in often appalling working conditions.”We are bitterly angry and disappointed by the government's expectation that NHS staff will work for normal rates of pay. For a first year house officer that is £4.02 an hour for working at what is expected to be the busiest time on record.”

“We have now reached a position where the comprehensive nature of the NHS has to be questioned,” Dr Ian Bogle told the BMA Junior Members Forum last month …