The health secretary, Victoria Atkins, has been accused of deliberately belittling junior doctors after describing them as “doctors in training”.
Atkins, who has refused to resume talks with junior doctors unless they call off their strike, made the comments in an aside on BBC Breakfast on Thursday. Junior doctors make up almost half of all doctors in the NHS in England and are often in post for a decade or more before moving to consultant level.
As doctors entered their second day of a three-day strike in England, Atkins showed no sign of shifting position. Describing negotiations on pay across the NHS, Atkins said: “The last cohort is that of junior doctors, or doctors in training as I prefer to call them, and they sadly, to my great disappointment, they walked out of our negotiations and then called the strike.”
Dr Heather Williams, a consultant medical physicist, wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “‘Doctors in training’ is deliberately used by Victoria Atkins to belittle here, as if the health secretary is speaking to undergrad students rather than established members of hospital staff responsible for patient care – pretty much everyone who isn’t a consultant.”
Many others in the medical and political world expressed outrage at the phrase. Dr Suzi Gage, a research lead at the Wellcome Trust, wrote: “I agree with her that ‘junior doctors’ is a bit of a misnomer, but not because they are doctors in training!!! Because they are fully qualified and undervalued.”
The Labour MP Chris Bryant wrote: “They’re doctors. Doctors. Not doctors in training.”
Talks between the government and the doctors’ union, the British Medical Association, broke down earlier this month after ministers refused to make a final offer before the BMA’s deadline.
The strike began at 7am on 20 December and is due to finish at the same time on Saturday. Amid fears that the strike could overwhelm hospitals already under pressure from winter viruses, Atkins said doctors had “picked the worst week in the NHS’s calendar” for industrial action.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday, Atkins said the junior doctors committee, which organised the industrial action, “decided to do it three days in the run-up to Christmas and they have also now picked the worst week in the NHS’s calendar in which to be on strike”.
She added: “There will be many, many doctors listening to this who feel deeply uncomfortable that their committee has called these strikes at this time. I would encourage anyone who feels like that quietly to consider whether this committee is in fact representing their views.”
The BMA’s junior doctors committee has said the government’s offer of a further 3% rise on top of the 8% already imposed was nowhere near enough. They argue they are due a 35% pay rise to make up for the 26.2% fall in the value of their pay since 2008.
Atkins told Sky News that she was “very much keen to negotiate with junior doctors” and that if they called off strikes the government would return to the negotiating table. She answered “yes” to whether there would be extra money for them.
But the co-chair of the BMA’s junior doctors committee Dr Robert Laurenson told Sky News on Wednesday the government was “completely reckless” to have an offer it was willing to make but refuse to during strikes.
“It’s actually madness and it’s the behaviour of an irrational partner,” he said. “The government have the power to sort this out by giving us something sensible to put to our members, and until they do that, we have nothing to put to our members.”
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “The British Medical Association has passed a motion to discontinue the use of the term junior doctor.
“To respect this and so we can continue to distinguish between different groups of doctors, we are using the contractual term doctors in training as collectively agreed with the union in this round of negotiations.”
