By Kylie MacLellan
LONDON (Reuters) – Thousands of junior doctors in England will stage a full walk out for 72 hours in March, including a refusal to provide emergency care, if a ballot for industrial action is successful, their trade union said on Friday.
The British Medical Association (BMA) will begin balloting its more than 45,000 junior doctor members on Monday for possible industrial action and urged the government to meet with it to negotiate over pay.
The BMA says that in real terms, junior doctors’ take-home pay has been cut by more than a quarter over the last 15 years. As part of a four-year pay deal agreed in 2019, junior doctors were given a 2% pay rise in 2022/23.
“Pay erosion, exhaustion and despair are forcing junior doctors out of the NHS, pushing waiting lists even higher as patients suffer needlessly,” Vivek Trivedi and Robert Laurenson, co-chairs of the BMA junior doctors committee, said in a statement.
“The government’s refusal to address fifteen years of pay erosion has given junior doctors no choice but to ballot for industrial action. If the government won’t fight for our health service, then we will.”
The BMA said it would be up to the organisations who manage healthcare in hospitals and elsewhere to ensure sufficient staffing is in place to maintain patient safety.
The government has previously said public sector pay restraint is needed in order to get double-digit inflation under control. It has warned that big pay settlements could embed inflation in the economy.
Strike action by doctors would heap more pressure on Britain’s state-funded National Health Service (NHS) which is already stretched by staff shortages and record backlogs.
It would also follow action by nurses and ambulance workers in December, with further walkouts planned this month.
On Thursday, the government said it would in the coming weeks introduce a new bill to parliament which would curb strike action in key sectors to ensure minimum safety levels are met during industrial action.
(Reporting by Kylie MacLellan; editing by William James)
