Lucy Dunn Lucy Dunn

How damaging will this junior doctors’ strike be?

Credit: Ian Forsyth/Getty

Across England, around 50,000 junior doctors are currently taking part in industrial action over a long-standing pay dispute. The doctors’ union, the British Medical Association (BMA), has calculated that junior doctors have watched their wages fall by 26 per cent in real terms since 2008. Now, they are striking for pay restoration of 35 per cent to compensate for 15 years of below-inflation wage increases. 

Predicted to be the ‘most disruptive’ strike to hit the NHS so far, the four-day walkout has been condemned by senior health service officials for the high risk of ‘real harms’ it will cause by putting patient care ‘on a knife edge’. Hospital leaders have admitted they are ‘more concerned about clinical safety than at any time during Covid surges’. As this bout of industrial action is taking place during the Easter school holidays, health bosses have raised concerns about added difficulties in finding consultants to cover, particularly for night shifts. As a result, health service officials have said that this time around there is a ‘real hike in [the] threat to patient safety’.

Emergency services have seen consultants who usually work in other departments drafted in to cover rota gaps, while the public has been urged to avoid ‘risky behaviour’ between now and 7 a.m. on Saturday. And while cover for A&E departments is a main priority, it is non-urgent hospital care that has already taken a devastating hit. Around 300,000 appointments and routine operations have been cancelled in order to ensure there is capacity to deal with emergency admissions over the four-day period. Of those cancelled appointments, many were for cancer patients. 

Consultants, senior doctors who are not striking, have joined picket lines briefly on their breaks to show solidarity — when they’re not having to provide cover in A&E.

In a statement released yesterday, Downing Street insisted that no talks would be held with the BMA unless junior doctors ‘abandoned their starting position of a 35 per cent rise and called off the strikes’.

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