DOCTORS and campaigners shouted down a Tory MP yesterday who called the junior doctors’ proposed strike “appalling” and “too extreme.”

Totnes MP and former practising GP Sarah Wollaston told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that the decision of the British Medical Association (BMA) to ballot for strike action would put patients at risk.

Junior doctors are being asked whether they agree to stop providing emergency care from December 2 and walk out in the following weeks after cuts to overtime pay.

Commons health select committee chair Dr Wollaston said that by striking, the BMA “is not putting patients first.

“I think this will be highly unsafe for patients.

“I think it is appalling the BMA is taking this action — it is far too extreme.”

Health Minister Jeremy Hunt has attempted to prevent industrial action by proposing an 11 per cent basic pay increase, to be applied also to “unsocial hours” from 7pm on Saturdays.

But the BMA’s junior doc

tors committee chairman Johann Malawana said the offer was misleading as it would be “offset by changes to pay for unsocial hours — devaluing the vital work junior doctors do at evenings and weekends.”

His concerns were shared by NHS activists who thought Dr Wollaston “should be putting the pressure on Jeremy Hunt rather than try to put pressure on the junior doctors to cave in to unacceptable demands.”

London Health Emergency director John Lister told the Star: “She has experience as a doctor but she now seems to be acting as a representative of the governing party instead of a representative of public opinion, because I think that everybody else in Britain supports the junior doctors, apart from the Tory MPs in Parliament.

“They are always going to try to make it look as if it’s somehow about pay, as if the doctors are being selfish — all of which was completely phoney.

“What we have is a situation in which doctors could be deterred from actually practising in this country.

“We could lose a large number of junior doctors to other countries, but more to the point we could make it impossible to attract new people into the profession and sustain the NHS.

“If they do this to the junior doctors they are going to come next for all the other health workers, all of them who depend for their very livelihood on this supplementary pay they get for working unsocial hours.”