Thousands of appointments and procedures will be postponed this week when junior doctors in England hold their latest strike, as their pay dispute continues.
The BMA (British Medical Association) trade union’s junior doctors committee voted on July 26 to stage four days of action in August to put further pressure on the government. All hospitals could face fresh disruption from the strikes, following industrial action that took place in various sectors across the UK this summer.
This will be the fifth junior doctors’ strike in 2023. How did we get to this point?
When are junior doctors striking?
Junior doctors in England will be on strike from 7am on Friday August 11 until 7am on Tuesday August 15. This will be the ninth successive month of union action across NHS services.
Why are junior doctors holding strikes?
The BMA has said it wants the government to return to the negotiating table and help negotiate a pay rise for junior doctors. It said junior doctors have lost more than a quarter of their pay in 15 years as a result of salaries not keeping up with inflation.
The BMA junior doctors’ committee co-chairmen Dr Robert Laurenson and Dr Vivek Trivedi said: “It should never have got to the point where we needed to announce a fifth round of strike action. Our message today remains the same: act like a responsible government, come to the table to negotiate with us in good faith, and, with a credible offer, these strikes need not go ahead at all.
“The prime minister has told us that talks are over. But it is not for Rishi Sunak to decide that negotiations are over before he has even stepped in the room. This dispute will end only at the negotiating table. If the PM was hoping to demoralise and divide our profession with his actions, he will be disappointed.”
The statement added: “Consultants, along with our SAS colleagues, have covered crucial services during our strikes and those same consultants were also on their own picket lines last week. Mutual solidarity has been on display at hospital picket lines up and down the country: this is a profession united in its refusal to accept yet another pay cut.”
What has been the impact of the strikes?
This is the fifth strike from junior doctors. The NHS has said there have been 450 hours without a third of the medical workforce over the past five months – the equivalent of 19 full days.
Around 778,000 hospital appointments across the NHS have been disrupted owing to strikes and over 458,000 staff shifts interrupted.
It is now harder for the NHS to cover after a ruling in the high court declaring that agency staff should not be filling in for striking workers during industrial action.
However, the ruling does not apply to a hospital’s own bank staff, and NHS Employers has provided guidance to trusts on this issue.
Last month the health secretary, Stephen Barclay, criticised junior doctors for “walking away” from talks.
“They have walked away from talks,” he told Sky News. “We were in the middle of discussions with them. There were a range of other factors that they have raised with me in terms of annual leave that is often cancelled at short notice, rotas that have changed, some of the wellbeing issues…”
How the NHS will try to cope
The NHS’s national medical director, Professor Sir Stephen Powis, who came to prominence for his Covid-19 briefings, said: “It will be a challenging time. This latest round of junior doctors strikes will again significantly disrupt services for patients and the additional challenge this time is that organisations are unable to use agency workers to cover staff out on strike. It is also a period of time where NHS staff often take annual leave, so there are already gaps in the workforce.
“We will continue to prioritise emergency care but it inevitably means that many thousands of appointments will need to be postponed.”
Sir Stephen said that the 999 number should be called only in a life-threatening emergency and that 111 should be used for anything non-urgent.
He added that GP surgeries are open, as are pharmacies, and that anybody with an appointment should try to show up.
“While NHS staff are doing all they can to manage, there is no doubt that the cumulative impact of strikes increases with each action, as the NHS continues to tackle the biggest backlog in its history,” said Sir Stephen.
