I enjoyed Brendan Walsh’s evocative memoir of Irish doctors coming to keep the English healthy (“Blessed with the best of bedside manners”, 20 June) with great interest because so many of my relatives are Catholic doctors, though from an Irish-Scottish background rather than pure Irish. He quotes a doctor in London saying “The working hours of junior doctors in Ireland would be unimaginable - and illegal! - in the UK.”
Ireland is covered by the EU working time directive and if junior doctors are exploited there it is illegal. In 2011, a 23-year-old Scottish doctor died when her car veered off the road after she had worked a 107-hour week and she was exhausted. In my time as an MP some of the worst deaths in hospitals were at weekends when tired junior doctors made mistakes due to overwork.
The EU rules have been in place in 1994 but it was only last year that the NHS in Scotland agreed to limit the long hours worked by doctors. The price for burying our head in the British sand and refusing to limit doctors’ hours in line with European law has been high.
Dr Denis MacShane, London SW1V
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