Hospital doctors in England have staged the biggest walkout in the history of the UK’s state-funded National Health Service.
Gatekeepers News reports that the unprecedented five-day stoppage over pay and staff retention has prompted fears for patient safety.
It is the latest in eight months of industrial action across the NHS, which is already reeling from a vast pandemic backlog.
The 27-year-old junior doctor Arjan Sing, on a picket line outside London’s University College Hospital said, “The NHS has been running on goodwill and now this is the last chance to change that.”
Sing said colleagues were planning to leave for countries that “care about their doctors”.
He added, “Doctors have realised they work in a global market, they’re not restricted to this country.”
Meanwhile, nurses, ambulance staff and other medical workers have all joined picket lines in recent months, adding to the pressure on patient appointments.
According to reports, the industrial action by junior doctors, those below the consultant level will run until 7:00 am (0600 GMT) on Tuesday.
This comes against a background of walk-outs across the economy from train drivers to lawyers over the past year as the UK battles a crippling cost-of-living crisis.
In a related development, senior hospital doctors, known as consultants, in England, will also begin a 48-hour strike on July 20, with radiographers following suit from July 25.
The bitter row between junior doctors and the government has seen them call for their 2008-9 pay levels to be restored — something the government says would mean an average pay award of about 35 per cent.
Meanwhile, the British Medical Association’s Junior Doctors Committee said medics have effectively had a 26 per cent pay cut in real terms in the last 15 years, as salaries have failed to keep pace with soaring inflation.
The government claims that backdating their pay to reflect inflation since 2008 is too costly and has instead offered an extra five per cent, as it battles to reduce inflation.
BMA leaders Robert Laurenson and Vivek Trivedi said, “Today marks the start of the longest single walkout by doctors in the NHS’s history, but this is still not a record that needs to go into the history books.
“We can call this strike off today if the UK government will simply follow the example of the government in Scotland and drop their nonsensical precondition of not talking whilst strikes are announced and produce an offer which is credible to the doctors they are speaking with.”
Similar stoppages in June and April resulted in massive disruption with hundreds of thousands of hospital appointments and operations rescheduled.
Laurenson and Trivedi added, “The complete inflexibility we see from the UK government today is baffling, frustrating, and ultimately destructive for everyone who wants waiting lists to go down and NHS staffing numbers to go up.”
