Resident doctors in England to stage four-day strike in June | Doctors
Junior doctors in England will go on a 16th strike next month in a long-running job and pay dispute and have blamed the new health secretary for their decisions.
They will strike for four days, from 7am on Monday, June 15th, to 6.59am on Friday, June 19th. Announcing the move, the British Medical Association warned junior doctors would take a break from work once again in July unless progress was made to meet their demands.
Next month’s 96-hour protest will be the junior doctors’ 16th since their first stop in March 2023. This will disrupt NHS care and force hospitals to rearrange tens of thousands of diagnostic tests, outpatient appointments and operations.
The BMA is calling for a pay rise for England’s 75,000 junior doctors to compensate for the 26 per cent loss in the real value of their wages since 2008-09.
The doctors’ union and professional body are also calling on the NHS to greatly increase the number of training places for junior doctors to pursue careers in medical specialties. The BMA represents approximately 55,000 of these 75,000 paramedics.
But hopes for a resolution to the conflict seem as remote as ever. James Murray, who replaced Wes Streeting as health minister on May 14, rejected the pay demands as “unrealistic, unaffordable and unsustainable”.
Murray, who met with BMA representatives earlier on Wednesday, said: “I am disappointed that the BMA has refused to consider further discussion on how to strengthen the agreement on the table and has instead turned once again to unnecessary and unreasonable strike action.”
“After pay rises of 33.4 per cent for junior doctors over the last four years – the highest across the public sector – I have been clear to the BMA that its demands for more significant pay rises this year are unrealistic, unaffordable and unsustainable.
“These are not justifications for further strike action that patients do not support, which puts further pressure on other staff and costs the NHS hundreds of millions of pounds.”
The strike will force hospitals to rearrange thousands of diagnostic tests, outpatient appointments and operations, costing the NHS an estimated £50 million a day to run.
Chairman of the BMA’s junior doctors committee, Dr. Jack Fletcher blamed Murray’s alleged intransigence in recent talks for the latest strike and warned that further talks appeared pointless.
“We were hoping that there would be a change of leadership at the Department of Health and Social Care. [DHSC] will lead to a change in approach. Unfortunately, we encountered the same reluctance to move that we encountered under Mr. Streeting,” Fletcher said.
“We were prepared to give Mr Murray time to settle into his role before completing the work left unfinished by his predecessor, both by offering fair and meaningful pay and making concrete commitments to end the jobs bottleneck that is curtailing the careers of our colleagues. “He had a real opportunity to break this impasse with fresh energy and ambition.
“He didn’t agree to that. Instead, we hear the same tired line: Uncertainty about new jobs and no more money on the table. We can’t be asked to negotiate in good faith for weeks, we’re just told there’s nothing left to negotiate on salary and there are no further details about jobs at this stage.”
The NHS Alliance, which represents NHS trusts, criticized the latest strike.
Matthew Hopkins, interim director of the emergency and ambulance network, said: “The decision to strike again is rash and completely irresponsible and will leave patients paying the price.” “Healthcare leaders and their teams will be deeply concerned by this new strike threat from junior doctors, given the additional pressure it will put on already stretched clinical and administrative colleagues.”
Meanwhile, the BMA’s GP committee plans to vote on GPs in England on the possibility of surgeries starting to offer much more specialist care to patients. In such a case, GP practices would become more like dental surgeries and could introduce means-tested, subscription-based services.
The vote follows months of wrangling between the BMA and DHSC over the annual contract to which GPs are subject and the heavy workload of family doctors.
