RESIDENT doctors leaders declared their determination to defeat the Labour government’s continuing attacks on jobs and pay when they appeared on BBC Radio yesterday morning.
On Wednesday afternoon the BMA had announced: ‘Following weeks of talks between the government and the BMA, the new Health Secretary, James Murray, has made clear he will not increase the investment in the offer already rejected by resident doctors.
‘Without any meaningful change to the latest offer the Resident Doctors Committee (RDC) has been left with no choice but to call further strike action in England.
‘The action will run from 7am Monday 15th June to 6.59am Friday 19th June, with more strike dates in July to be announced in the event of no further progress being made.’
BMA Resident Doctors Committee Chairman Dr Jack Fletcher said: ‘Last year when we surveyed our foundation year two doctors nearly half of them didn’t have substantive employment, literally with a few weeks to go before they come to the end of their contracts.
‘Doctors are working in a gig economy in the NHS. We’re the only large workforce in the NHS who don’t work on substantive contracts. We have three month, six month, twelve month contracts. We want to see an end to that and that’s part of this negotiation.
‘Thousands of doctors continue to leave the NHS, and take-home pay remains a fifth lower in real terms than it was in 2008. If Mr Murray wishes to make a success of his new role, he must confront this issue before any other.
‘We are prepared to accept that he may have inherited plans already in motion when he took office. If so, he now has a new opportunity to demonstrate genuine leadership and prevent further strike action. Our ask is straightforward: A credible, meaningful offer comprising concrete new jobs and real progress towards pay restoration.
‘Mr Murray arrives in this role directly from the Treasury, where his job was to weigh the costs and benefits of public spending. We would expect him, of all people, to understand that the costs of prolonged, avoidable strike action would far outweigh a deal that secured the future of the NHS workforce. The calculation is not a difficult one.’
BMA Council Deputy Chair Dr Emma Runswick said: ‘We are still in a position where fully qualified doctors are paid less than £20 an hour.
‘Those treating your children, the first person to see you overnight in a hospital, looking after the sickest patients – they are paid £19.27 an hour.
‘If they had been paid in line with inflation they would be paid £23 an hour.
‘We are still down, despite all those pay increases, those discussions. We are still down a fifth compared to the people who were doing the same jobs in 2008.
‘And even that money doesn’t solve the jobs crisis we’re in. The absolute chaos in workforce planning has created a situation where 40,000 doctors a year have applied for approximately 11,000 jobs, leaving many of them facing unemployment.
‘I’ve got colleagues, including recent parents, who are about to be thrown onto the scrapheap of gig economy work, because we do not provide the jobs for all the medical students who have qualified.’