MORE than 60,000 junior doctor members of the British Medical Association (BMA) are going on strike for three days this week against massive 31.7% pay cuts.
BMA Junior Doctors Committee Chair Dr Rob Laurenson appeared on Sky News yesterday morning, ahead of his members’ 72-hour strike from 7am on Wednesday until 7am on Saturday this week.
Junior doctors are holding three days of strike action this month and every month in their fight for pay restoration, while BMA consultants announced last week that they are to join their junior colleagues in the pay fight and take two days of strike action at the end of July.
Meanwhile, 300,000 members of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) are also balloting for further strike action.
Dr Rob Laurenson said yesterday: ‘We are having to call strike action again because the government’s offer of 5% and £1,500, does nothing to restore pay erosion, and in fact would be another real terms pay cut…
‘I think what’s really important is that the government has failed for over a decade now to produce a credible workforce plan that is going to be able to address outpatient waiting times.
‘And we’ve seen over the past ten years waiting times for appointments going up and up and up. It’s the government’s responsibility to fund and resource a healthcare system that works for everyone in this country …
‘Myself, my family, we all rely on the NHS as well and the disruption caused is not pleasant for anyone involved. It’s a disaster and it’s a disaster that falls primarily at the feet of government.
‘The government actually obliterated any sense of good faith in the negotiations when they came out with an offer of 5% and £1,500 …
‘Doctors have suffered a 31.7% pay erosion. It’s increased because Rishi Sunak failed to deliver on keeping inflation down in 2022-23 and doctors have suffered for so long, because we have been operating on a system of goodwill, working under intense pressures in the NHS, not just during the pandemic but before and I think it’s really frankly wrong for this government to continue offering real-terms pay cuts even during this dispute which is fundamentally about pay restoration …
‘A real terms pay cut this year is further pay erosion … our pay erosion has been 31.7% now over 15 years …
‘Our priorities here are to represent doctors and to be able to restore the pay erosion that doctors have seen, because waiting times for appointments are astronomically high …
‘We’ll be reballoting between 19th June and 31st August. That will give us an extended six-months mandate which will look towards March of 2024 and if we need to we will reballot again to extend our mandate further,’ the leader of the 70,000 BMA junior doctors declared yesterday, ahead of this week’s three day strike.
‘Our members have given us a clear instruction. They would like us to pursue full pay restoration back to 2008 and that’s what we intend to do in our representation of our doctors and our healthcare system.
‘The longterm impact on the NHS without a workforce and without doctors as they flee to countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand is that these waiting lists will increase.
‘We heard from the Royal College of Radiologists recently that there are significant delays to cancer care all year round, not just in winter, all year round, because of a lack of workforce.’
