The longest such industrial action in the history of the NHS will involve thousands of junior doctors striking across England in the UK for five days.
It is anticipated that thousands of NHS consultations and operations may need to be cancelled as a result of the unprecedented action by doctors, who can have up to eight years of experience as hospital doctors or three years in general practise. The strike will last from 7am on July 13 to 7am on July 18.
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The wave of industrial unrest in the NHS has forced the postponement of more than 500,000 consultations, operations, and treatments across England. Strikes in the UK on the ongoing conflict over NHS pay started towards the end of 2022.
Next month’s five-day strike will be the fourth this year by junior doctors in England and is expected to cause mass disruption.
The British Medical Association (BMA) is calling for “full restoration” of pay, which it says has been cut by 26%. The government has offered 5% to end the dispute.
In a statement issued on Friday, the co-chairs of the BMA junior doctors committee, Dr Robert Laurenson and Dr Vivek Trivedi, said;
We are announcing the longest single walkout by doctors in the NHS’s history – but this is not a record that needs to go into the history books. Even now the government can avert our action by coming to the table with a credible offer on pay restoration.
The NHS is one of this country’s proudest achievements and it is shameful that we have a government seemingly content to let it decline to the point of collapse with decades of real-terms pay cuts to doctors driving them away.
With the 75th birthday of the NHS just days away, neglect of its workforce has left us with 7.4 million people on waiting lists for surgery and procedures, 8,500 unfilled doctors’ posts in hospitals, and doctors who can barely walk down the road without a foreign government tempting them to leave an NHS where they are paid £14 an hour for a country which will pay them properly.
It has been almost a week since the last round of strikes finished but not once have we heard from Rishi Sunak or Steve Barclay in terms of reopening negotiations since their collapse of our talks and cancelling all scheduled meetings a month ago. What better indication of how committed they are to ending this dispute could we have?
