LONDON (AFP) – Hospital doctors in England launched their latest walkout as the government said their strike to demand a 35-percent pay increase served “only to harm patients”.
The four-day stoppage on Friday comes with health chiefs estimating that the repeated industrial action had cost the publicly funded health service GBP1 billion.
The British Medical Association (BMA) which represents junior doctors said their take-home pay has fallen by 26 per cent in the last 15 years.
Health Secretary Steve Barclay issued his strongest condemnation so far of the doctors who have rejected the government’s pay offer of six per cent plus a one-off payment of GBP1,250.
Writing in the Daily Mail, he accused the BMA of “acting recklessly”.The strike action served “only to harm patients and put further pressure on their own colleagues”, he added. Doctors on the picket line outside University College Hospital in central London hospital, however, said they had no choice but to strike to restore pay levels and stop doctors leaving the state-funded National Health Service (NHS).
“Full pay restoration must happen, that’s not for negotiation, what is for negotiation is how it is structured and what the time frame is,” a doctor and co-chair of the BMA’s junior doctors committee Robert Laurenson told AFP.
“This is predominantly about pay because we know that many of our colleagues leave to go to other countries and other industries simply because the pay is too poor to be able to retain doctors,” he added.
Junior doctors – physicians who are not senior specialists but who may still have years of experience – make up about half of the doctors in United Kingdom hospitals. The strike is their fifth round of industrial action. “Doctors are working tirelessly to bring waiting lists down. The government are the ones who refuse to come to the table,” added junior doctor Sumi Manirajan, who is Deputy Co-Chair of the committee.
“We are chronically understaffed and everyone is at breaking point,” he added.
The NHS is grappling with record patient waiting times due to a large pandemic backlog. A record 7.6 million people in England were waiting to start routine hospital treatment in June, according to data published by the NHS on Thursday.
Chief Executive of NHS Providers Julian Hartley said the series of strikes by junior doctors had cost the NHS GBP1 billion.
Hospitals were having to “pay premium rates to consultants” to cover for the medics, he told BBC radio.
