Resident Doctors in England to Begin Five Consecutive Day Walkout Next Month
Medical professionals in the UK are preparing to stage a five-day strike in November, in protest over pay and employment.
Strike Details
The British Medical Association (BMA) announced that junior physicians will strike for five days in a row from November 14 at 7am to 7am on 19 November.
Junior physicians, who make up nearly 50% of all doctors in the NHS, are taking this action after failed negotiations with the government.
Causes of the Walkout
The chair of the BMA’s resident doctors committee commented, “We did not want to reach this point. We have been negotiating for the past week with officials, pressing the health secretary to resolve the crisis of doctors going unemployed.”
“We know from our own survey 50% of second-year physicians in England are struggling to find jobs, their skills going to waste whilst countless individuals wait endlessly for treatment and shifts in hospitals remain vacant. This is a situation which cannot go on.”
He added, “We talked with the government in good faith, hoping the minister to understand that a deal offering solutions to gradually reverse the cuts to pay over a number of years, providing newly trained doctors a raise of just a pound an hour for the next four years.”
“We trusted the government would recognize that our asks are not just reasonable but are in the interest of the community and our patients and would also help stop our doctors leaving the health service.”
Who Are Resident Physicians?
Junior physicians have anywhere up to eight years’ experience working as a hospital doctor, depending on their specialty, or as many as three years in primary care.
More details will follow soon.
