Junior doctors in England will walk out for three consecutive days next month after voting overwhelmingly to take industrial action over pay, claiming the government has refused to engage.
(Bloomberg) — Junior doctors in England will walk out for three consecutive days next month after voting overwhelmingly to take industrial action over pay, claiming the government has refused to engage.
The British Medical Association said Friday trainee doctors will not report for work starting March 13 as they push for a higher than 2% raise for the current fiscal year. The strike, which will continue until early on March 16, is is the longest consecutive walkout by health workers in the current protest. The BMA represents 47,600 junior doctors in England.
“Make no mistake, this strike was absolutely in the government’s gift to avert; they know it, we know it and our patients also need to know it,” said Robert Laurenson and Vivek Trivedi, co-chairs of BMA’s junior doctors committee. “We are left with no option but to proceed with this action.”
The doctors will be on strike when Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt presents the budget on March 15, underscoring the challenge faced by a government which is witnessing a wave of industrial action across public services. With inflation above 10%, unions are demanding bigger raises but the government offered workers — including nurses, police officers, teachers and dentists — a 3.5% for 2023-24.
Read More: UK Ambulance Workers to Strike Again Even as Nurses Start Talks
The budget day looks set to witness the biggest day for industrial action in over a decade with over 500,000 workers called out on strike. In the past few months, Britain has seen train drivers, teachers, ambulance workers, border force officials and others walk out, demanding higher wages to meet the increased cost of living.
The BMA doctors will be joined by the Hospital Consultants & Specialists Association, a smaller union of junior medics.
“This unprecedented scale of industrial action in the NHS threatens to cause serious disruption to patients,” Miriam Deakin, director of policy at NHS Providers said. “It will also likely hamper the hard efforts of NHS staff to tackle backlogs and meet elective targets.”
The junior doctors strike call comes as other health unions are infuriated by ministers’ tactics and the Royal College of Nursing’s decision on Tuesday to suspend walkouts from March 1 until March 3 so that negotiations could resume. The RCN is currently in intensive talks with the government but other health unions have not been invited, and are instead ramping up strikes.
(Updates with strike call by another doctors union and comment from NHS Providers in sixth paragraph.)
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