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Junior doctors in England will go on strike for four more days next month, in an escalation of their campaign to secure a better pay offer from Rishi Sunak’s government.
The British Medical Association, the main doctors’ union, said on Wednesday that junior doctors would walk out between August 11 and August 15. It will be their fifth stoppage since a wave of industrial action involving doctors, nurses, ambulance workers and other staff first hit the NHS in December last year.
Junior doctors belonging to the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association, a smaller union, will also join the strike.
Consultants in England, who this month staged their first action for more than a decade, have already announced a 48-hour strike from August 24, piling fresh pressure on the prime minister’s pledge to cut NHS waiting lists ahead of the general election expected next year.
Official figures published on Monday showed that industrial action by NHS workers has led to the cancellation of more than 820,000 operations and hospital appointments since last year, while 7.5mn people are awaiting non-urgent hospital treatment, according to data from earlier this month.
Sunak this month announced a 6 per cent wage increase for 2023-24, plus a £1,250 consolidated payment, for junior doctors in a push to end the wave of public sector walkouts sparked by the cost of living crisis. He said the offer was “final” and that “no amount of strikes” would “change this decision”.
But Robert Laurenson and Vivek Trivedi, co-chairs of the BMA junior doctors’ committee, said the government’s proposal failed to make up for 15 years of pay erosion and that it was “not for . . . Sunak to decide that negotiations are over before he has even stepped in the room”.
“Our message today remains the same: act like a responsible government, come to the table to negotiate with us in good faith, and with a credible offer these strikes need not go ahead at all,” they added.
In May, the NHS Staff Council voted to accept an offer of a 5 per cent rise for 2023-23 and one-off payments worth up to £3,789 for 2022-23 for the 1mn-plus workers in England whose pay is negotiated under the “Agenda for Change” framework.
Members of the Royal College of Nursing voted against the offer, but in June the main nursing union’s leadership failed to win a new mandate for walkouts.
However, radiographers in England covered by the May deal are now on a 48-hour strike, with about one-quarter of the profession on picket lines.
Laurenson and Trivedi said consultants and other doctors had covered crucial services during strikes by junior doctors, who staged an unprecedented five-day stoppage this month, with “mutual solidarity” in evidence across the country.
Theirs was “a profession united in its refusal to accept yet another pay cut”, they added.
Health minister Will Quince described the four-day walkout as “a hugely disappointing move by the BMA, whose continued action will harm patient care and put further pressure on other NHS staff”.
Doctors in training were receiving an average increase of roughly 8.8 per cent, “which is above what most in the public and private sectors are receiving”, he added.
Separately, NHS England on Thursday set out plans to ease winter pressures, warning that it was bracing for “the possibility of higher than usual levels of respiratory illness including Covid, flu and RSV [respiratory syncytial virus]”.
It said Australia, where activity often indicates what England is likely to experience, was enduring one of the biggest flu seasons on record, with children particularly affected.
Acute respiratory hubs, where patients can get an urgent same-day face-to-face assessment, will be available in every part of the country. Care “traffic control” centres will also be launched in an effort to join up different services, such as social care and housing, so it is easier to discharge medically fit people from hospital.
“Drawing information from electronic patient records to track patients and link up with housing services, it is expected a third of patients could be discharged using this model by December,” NHS England said, adding that it would make available 800 more ambulances and 5,000 extra beds.
