Resident Doctors in the UK to Launch Five-Day Walkout Next Month
Doctors in the UK are set to begin a five-day walkout next month, due to disputes regarding jobs and pay.
Strike Details
The BMA announced that resident doctors will strike for five consecutive days from November 14 at 7am to November 19 at 7am.
Junior physicians, who constitute about half of all doctors in the NHS, are taking this action after unsuccessful talks with the health department.
Reasons Behind the Strike
The chair of the BMA’s resident doctors committee stated, “We did not want to reach this point. We have been negotiating for the past week with officials, urging the health minister to resolve the scandal of unemployed physicians.”
“We know from our own survey half of second-year doctors in the UK are struggling to find jobs, their skills going to waste whilst countless individuals wait endlessly for treatment and hospital shifts remain vacant. This is a situation which cannot go on.”
He continued, “We negotiated sincerely, hoping the minister to understand that a agreement offering solutions to gradually reverse the cuts to pay over a number of years, providing newly trained doctors a raise of only £1 per hour for the coming four years.”
“We hoped the authorities would see that our demands are not just reasonable but are in the interest of the community and our patients and would also help prevent our doctors departing from the NHS.”
Who Are Resident Physicians?
Junior physicians have anywhere up to eight years’ experience working as a hospital doctor, depending on their specialty, or as many as three years in primary care.
More details are expected soon.
