Resident Doctors in England to Launch Five Consecutive Day Walkout Next Month
Doctors in England are preparing to stage a five consecutive day walkout in November, in protest over pay and employment.
Strike Details
The British Medical Association (BMA) stated that resident doctors will strike for five days in a row from November 14 at 7am to November 19 at 7am.
Resident doctors, who constitute about half of all medical staff in the National Health Service, are taking this action after failed negotiations with the government.
Causes of the Walkout
The chair of the BMA’s resident doctors committee commented, “This is not where we wanted to be. We have been negotiating for the past week with officials, pressing 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 facing unemployment, their skills going to waste whilst millions of patients wait endlessly for treatment and shifts in hospitals remain vacant. This is a situation which cannot go on.”
He added, “We talked with the government in good faith, hoping the minister to see that a agreement offering solutions to slowly restore the cuts to pay over several years, providing recent graduates a pay increase of just a pound an hour for the coming four years.”
“We trusted the government would see that our demands are not just fair but are in the interest of the public and our those we treat and would also help stop our physicians leaving the health service.”
Who Are Resident Physicians?
Junior physicians have anywhere up to eight years’ experience practicing in hospitals, based on their field, or up to three years in primary care.
Further information will follow soon.
