Resident Doctors in the UK to Begin Five Consecutive Day Walkout Next Month
Doctors in England are preparing to begin a five consecutive day strike next month, in protest over jobs and pay.
Walkout Information
The British Medical Association (BMA) announced that resident doctors will strike for five consecutive days from 7am on 14 November to 7am on 19 November.
Junior physicians, who constitute about half of all doctors in the NHS, are proceeding with the strike after failed negotiations with the health department.
Reasons Behind the Strike
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 government, urging the health minister to end the scandal of unemployed physicians.”
“We know from our own survey half of second-year doctors in England are facing unemployment, their skills going to waste whilst millions of patients wait endlessly for treatment and shifts in hospitals go unfilled. This is a situation which cannot go on.”
He continued, “We negotiated sincerely, keen for the minister to understand that a agreement offering solutions to slowly restore the cuts to pay over several years, giving newly trained doctors a pay increase of just a pound an hour for the next four years.”
“We hoped the authorities 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.”
About Resident Doctors
Junior physicians have anywhere up to eight years’ experience practicing in hospitals, depending on their specialty, or as many as three years in general practice.
More details will follow soon.
