Junior doctors are today beginning four days of strike action after a row over pay. Medics formed picket lines outside a number of Greater Manchester hospitals this morning as members of the British Medical Association (BMA) and the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association (HCSA) began industrial action.
An estimated 350,000 appointments, including operations, are expected to be cancelled across the country as a result of the action that follows years of what critics say are real-terms pay cuts that the government refuses to rectify.
The government say will they will not enter talks unless the BMA drop their demand for a 35 percent pay rise and call-off the strikes.
Mike Greenhalgh, 33, is a trauma and orthopedic surgery registrar based at the Royal Blackburn hospital in Lancashire. Mike, originally from Rossendale and who now lives in Chorley, is also co-deputy chair of the junior doctor's committee at the BMA.
He was today supporting colleagues at the picket line outside the Manchester Royal Infirmary (MRI) site. He said the NHS had 'been on its knees' for a long time and that pay stagnation meant junior doctors were being lost each day, leading to longer waiting lists for patients.
Here he explains why he and his colleagues are this week taking action
Since 2008, junior doctors have seen a real-term pay cut of over 26.1 percent. That has led to a real recruitment and retention crisis in the junior doctor workforce.
We're losing junior doctors to other professions, we're losing junior doctors due to people going to work abroad in places like Australia, New Zealand, Canada. Because of that, we're struggling to get waiting lists down. We need to keep doctors in the NHS, and to do that we need a fair pay deal for them.
There is a real strength of feeling. When we balloted our members 98 percent of doctors voted in favour of strike action. There's also a strength of public amongst the British public as well. A new poll today from IPSOS, showed the majority of the public do support junior doctors' strikes.
It's sad it has come to this. I would much rather be treating patients. I work in trauma and orthopedic sugrery, I would much rather be seeing patients in the clinic, helping with operations, but unfortunately, we have been driven to be here, as a last resort, by the government.
I'd like to apologise to anyone who's had an operation or appointment cancelled or postpoined due to the industrial action this week. But I think it's important to say the NHS has been on its knees for a long, long time now.
In my area, there are people who have been waiting to have hip replacements, knee replacements, for far, far too long. And the only way we can get those waiting lists and waiting times down is by having a well-resourced, well-staffed NHS and that includes a fair pay deal for junior doctors.
If you've got a well-staffed NHS then it can provide better care and they can get waiting lists down and get people seen faster, which is what the public really wants. They want to be able to come and see a doctor and have their appointments and operations, and we want to be able to deliver that.
But the simple truth is, there's not enough of us. There are 9,000 hospital doctor vacancies in England right now. You can go to any hospital up and down the country and they will tell you the same story. Patients are waiting far too long in A&E.
In December, we had over 50,000 people waiting over 12 hours in A&E. That is just ridiculous. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine said last week that patient safety has long been at risk due to chronic under-resourcing and underfunding and under-staffing of the health service.
The way we sort all of this is by making sure there's a fair pay deal for junior doctors. Our hope was to agree a deal before we even had to take our first lot of industrial action. We've been trying to speak to Mr Barclay since October, and writing to him before that, trying to get a fair deal for junior doctors,
Unfortunately, he's yet to give us any offer at all. But even at this late stage, a credible offer from Mr Barclay could start negotiations and could cancel our strike action.
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