Resident Doctors in the UK to Launch Five-Day Walkout Next Month
Medical professionals in the UK are preparing to begin a five consecutive day strike next month, in protest over jobs and pay.
Walkout Information
The BMA stated that resident doctors will walk out for five days in a row from November 14 at 7am to November 19 at 7am.
Junior physicians, who constitute nearly 50% of all medical staff in the NHS, are proceeding with the strike after unsuccessful talks with the government.
Reasons Behind the Strike
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, urging the health secretary to end the crisis of doctors going unemployed.”
“We know from our own survey half of second-year doctors in England are struggling to find jobs, their skills going to waste whilst countless individuals wait endlessly for treatment and shifts in hospitals go unfilled. This is a situation which cannot go on.”
He continued, “We talked with the government in good faith, hoping the health secretary to see that a agreement offering solutions to gradually reverse the cuts to pay over a number of years, giving recent graduates a pay increase of only £1 per hour for the coming four years.”
“We hoped the government would see that our asks are not just fair but are in the best interests of the public and our those we treat and would also help prevent our doctors departing from the NHS.”
About Resident Doctors
Resident doctors have anywhere up to eight years’ experience practicing in hospitals, based on their field, or as many as three years in general practice.
More details will follow soon.
