A leading GP has warned that low morale and burnout is driving many young doctors out of Northern Ireland's health service to other countries while more experienced doctors are choosing to retire early.
Dr Tom Black was speaking as members of the British Medical Association in England began a three-day walkout on Monday following a huge vote for industrial action.
It comes amid ongoing anger across the public sector, including recent strike action by nurses, health workers and paramedics.
Read more: NI midwives vote to take industrial action short of strike
The BMA said newly-qualified medics earn £14.09 an hour – less than a barista in a coffee shop and junior doctors have suffered a 26% real-terms cut to their pay since 2008/09.
Dr Black, chair of BMA’s Northern Ireland Council, said junior doctors here are “monitoring the situation closely as to whether to ballot for industrial action". He says the level of dissatisfaction, low morale and burnout among doctors is "as high as it has ever been” and is compounded by successive low pay awards combined with delays in receiving these awards.
Dr Black told Belfast Live: "We have problems across the health profession with junior doctors telling us that they're 26% behind their 2008 pay while for consultants and GPs it's more than 30%. We know what happened - in 2008 there was austerity and we took our oil to some extent over the last decade and a half.
"At some point, the government has to catch up with the wages that we had then, what the junior doctors are calling pay restoration. There's no sign or prospect of it and as a union, we have a responsibility not just to the doctors but also to the service.
"If we don't take action then we're letting the service down. When the nurses came out on strike, they weren't just standing up for themselves but the service."
Dr Black also highlighted how over 4% of GP practices here have opted to hand back their contracts in the past year alone.
"We have seen 13 GP practices deciding to hand their contracts back in the last 12 months, which is around 70 doctors and impacts thousands of patients. For doctors at the moment, our choice is to emigrate, resign or retire and unfortunately, a lot of the GPs are resigning and many consultants are emigrating.
"Every hospital here seems to be losing multiple consultants such as cardiologists, radiologists, gastroenterologists and pathologists. By emigrating, they're going down south to Dublin or Galway where they can earn twice the pay.
"It's also about job satisfaction and a lot of our surgeons are very frustrated about not being able to get theatre time to do surgery while doctors are frustrated about long waiting lists, which are anything up to six years. We have more than 600,000 on waiting lists between inpatients and outpatients."
He added: "We're choosing not to go on strike at the moment as we think it would be difficult. We should go on strike but we don't have the capacity at the moment with no Executive or Health Minister and a Permanent Secretary in charge who doesn't have the ability to increase funding so who would we be strike to influence?"
Last week, midwives in Northern Ireland voted to take industrial action short of a strike. The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) said in a formal ballot almost 94% of workers voted, in frustration over pay.
Midwives were given a 4% pay increase in December, which the union has criticised as being well below the rate of inflation, then at 10%. Some 93.9% voted for industrial action short of a strike, based on a turnout of 55% of eligible RCM members working in the health service in the region.
Almost 90% also voted to take industrial action consisting of a strike.
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