Resident Physicians in England to Stage Five-Day Walkout Next Month
Doctors in England are preparing to stage a five-day walkout in November, in protest over pay and employment.
Walkout Information
The BMA announced that resident doctors will walk out for five days in a row from November 14 at 7am to 7am on 19 November.
Resident doctors, who constitute about half of all medical staff in the NHS, are proceeding with the strike after unsuccessful talks with the government.
Causes of the Walkout
The chair of the BMA’s resident doctors committee stated, “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 doctors going unemployed.”
“We know from our own survey half of second-year doctors in the UK are facing unemployment, their talents being unused whilst millions of patients wait endlessly for treatment and shifts in hospitals remain vacant. This cannot continue.”
He continued, “We talked with the government in good faith, hoping the minister to understand that a agreement including options to slowly restore the pay reductions over several years, giving recent graduates a pay increase of just a pound an hour for the next four years.”
“We trusted the authorities would see that our demands are not just reasonable but are in the best interests of the public and our patients and would also help stop our doctors leaving the NHS.”
Who Are Resident Physicians?
Junior physicians have as much as eight years of experience working as a hospital doctor, depending on their specialty, or as many as three years in primary care.
More details will follow soon.
