RESIDENT doctors formed a large picket outside St Thomas’ Hospital on Friday morning as they began a five-day strike over falling pay and the escalating crisis in medical jobs.
Doctors said years of declining real-terms pay, shrinking opportunities and mounting workload pressures had pushed the NHS to a breaking point.
Dr Tom Dolphin, Chair of the BMA Council, told News Line: ‘This is not just about pay, it’s also about jobs.
‘We’ve got 30,000 applicants for 10,000 specialty training posts. We need to make sure doctors already in the system can progress so that we have the specialists and GPs the NHS will need in the future.’
Doctors on the picket described rota gaps, long delays in emergency departments and increasingly frequent departures of trained clinicians to countries offering stable employment and better conditions.
Dr Tracey Marshall told News Line that instability had shaped her entire career: ‘We have moved home eight times in twelve years because of training programmes. I’ve seen some of the best doctors I know leave for Australia and New Zealand where the pay and conditions are better.
‘Doctors struggle to get jobs after years of training, which is mad. I want to see a government that pays doctors properly so that they stay.’
Resident doctors said the current dispute was driven by both the training bottleneck and the erosion of entry-level pay.
Aadam Aziz, a resident doctor from north-west London, told News Line: ‘Doctors start at £18 per hour and we are demanding £22. That’s reasonable when our pay is still more than 20% below what it was in 2008 in real terms.
‘On jobs, there were 30,000 applicants for 10,000 training positions. That means 20,000 doctors without jobs at a time when patients are waiting up to 24 hours in A&E.
‘Britain has too few doctors per thousand people compared with the European average. We should be training more, not pushing new doctors out of work.’
Dr Arthur Joustra, a paediatric trainee, also told News Line: ‘Lots of doctors can’t get the portfolio points they need for training, so they end up in low-paid jobs or leaving the country.
‘Waiting lists in paediatrics are huge. Without enough doctors they will not come down.’
He said the decision to strike was taken reluctantly but out of necessity: ‘Doctors hate being on strike, but to maintain the NHS, doctors need to be paid correctly.’
