Junior Doctors to Strike for Five Days in Run-Up to Christmas
Junior doctors will stage a five-day strike in the run-up to Christmas, walking out from December 17th to 22nd in demand of a further 26% pay rise, the British Medical Association has announced. The Telegraph has more.
It is the third round of strikes since July, following five days on the picket lines last month.
Dr Jack Fletcher, chairman of the BMA’s resident doctors committee, said: “With the Government failing to put forward a credible plan to fix the jobs crisis for resident doctors at the same time as pushing a real terms pay cut for them, we have no choice but to announce more strike dates.”
He said that “gradually raising pay over a few years and some common-sense fixes to the job security of our doctors are well within the reach of this Government”.
The resident doctors have received pay rises amounting to 28.9% over the last three years.
The walkout, just days before the Christmas period, will be the 14th time they have staged industrial action since March 2023.
The medics have a mandate to strike until January but announced last week they would be re-balloting members to extend this for a further six months.
The doctors are also in dispute with the Government over ‘training bottlenecks’ that have left UK graduates unable to progress in their careers.
This is in part because of a surge in foreign doctors applying for the limited number of spaces available for medics to specialise in areas such as surgery, medicine and general practice.
Worth reading in full.
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Turn up to work, or its P45. They are taking the absolute piss.
The picture is of doctors who need jobs. Not the mainly foreign ones going on strike with jobs.
Ah, but they are worth it.
Threatening to strike close to Christmas or any other peak time effectively implies that patients will be treated as human hostages to acquire leverage. That sounds like blackmail to me. Maybe a doctor who is prepared to abandon its patients is in the wrong job. Medicine is not an easy profession to enter. How strange not to want to practise it but to prefer to agitate rather than negotiate.
It would be good to hear more about their reasons for striking, from the Indigenous British Junior Doctors themselves, who appear to be pushed aside as Third World Ethnic Doctors are being given PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT in acceptance to medical schools and training.
They would need to speak anonymously, of course, for fear of retribution from the Stalinists…
Please make it permanent, then the NHS can be abolished and replaced with a competitive, private and voluntary sector free market in health insurance and provision, like it used to be before 1948 and 1911 (when 75% of the population had private health insurance – and there were over 2 750 hospitals. )
In comparison, I think nurses and midwives have only gone on strike once or twice since the inception of the RCN, more than a century ago. Junior doctors do work very hard but so do all front-line staff. This is taking the Mick.