Junior Doctors in England to Begin Five Consecutive Day Walkout Next Month
Doctors in the UK are set to stage a five-day strike in November, due to disputes regarding pay and employment.
Walkout Information
The British Medical Association (BMA) announced that resident doctors will strike for five days in a row from 7am on 14 November to 7am on 19 November.
Resident doctors, who make up nearly 50% of all medical staff in the NHS, are proceeding with the strike after failed negotiations with the government.
Reasons Behind the Strike
The chair of the BMA’s resident doctors committee stated, “We did not want to reach this point. We have been negotiating for the past week with officials, pressing the health minister to end the scandal of unemployed physicians.”
“We know from our own survey half of second-year doctors in the UK are struggling to find jobs, their talents being unused whilst countless individuals wait endlessly for treatment and shifts in hospitals go unfilled. This cannot continue.”
He continued, “We talked with the government in good faith, hoping the minister to see that a agreement including options to gradually reverse the pay reductions over several years, providing recent graduates a raise of just a pound an hour for the next four years.”
“We hoped the authorities would see that our demands are not just reasonable but are in the best interests of the community and our patients and would also help prevent our doctors leaving the health service.”
About Resident Doctors
Junior physicians have as much as eight years of experience working as a hospital doctor, depending on their specialty, or as many as three years in primary care.
Further information are expected shortly.
