THERE was massive support for the hundreds of picket lines outside hospitals all around the country yesterday morning as 47,600 junior doctors began their 96-hour strike at 7am.
Thousands of junior doctors gathered for a rally in Trafalgar Square, from where they embarked on a march to Downing Street, chanting slogans such as ‘What do we want? Fair pay. When do we want it? Now!’ and ‘Claps don’t pay the bills – Claps don’t pay the bills!’
Some of the handmade posters on the march and on the picket lines said: ‘Scarcity is a fake problem. Pay public sector workers fairly. Dead on our feet – we need CPR! Limited edition 26% off! Get Your doctor – while stocks last!’
Cars, lorries and buses passing the mass picket line outside University College London Hospital (UCLH) along the busy Marylebone Road hooted continuously in support.
On the UCLH picket line, Dr Arjan Singh told News Line: ‘We’re on strike today because pay is eroding to such an extent we don’t have enough doctors for our patients and because 500 people are dying needlessly every week.
‘All we want is to meet with (Health Secretary) Steve Barclay to get a credible offer we can take to our members.
‘In the first meeting he had no mandate and he walked out of the second meeting. We’re giving him a solution to the workforce crisis in the NHS. The solution is restore junior doctors’ pay from £14 an hour to £19 an hour.
‘Anyone would think that very “reasonable”. We’ve got a big mandate 98% yes vote. We don’t strike often so when we do there’s a good reason.
‘Junior doctors make up approximately half of the whole medical workforce. All we’re asking for is £5 an hour and we’ll stay. So far we are not getting anywhere.’
Dr Sumi Maararajan, Deputy co-chair of the BMA Junior Doctors Committee, said: ‘We need to look at the state the NHS is in at the moment. We’ve got 7.2 million patients on waiting lists. This is more than the number of people we’ve got living in Scotland.
‘The government isn’t operating a health service, they are operating a waiting list and we’ve got 500 patients dying needlessly every week. We can’t solve this without doctors.’
She went on: ‘We are on strike because the government won’t negotiate with us. They haven’t given us an opening offer and without an opening offer there’s nothing to negotiate. We are seeking to find a way in which we can get pay restoration for junior doctors.
‘We are open to creative ways as to how we can restore the pay of our junior doctors. We need to appreciate that we are 9,000 doctors down.
‘With millions on the waiting lists we can’t bring these numbers down without doctors, and patients know this as well.
‘Patients are appreciating the reason that they can’t see their GP, the reason they can’t see a hospital specialist is because there aren’t any and the public do support us.’
She continued: ‘Consultants have seen a huge decrease in their pay, they’ve seen a pay erosion higher than the junior doctors have. It’s the highest in the public sector. They’ve lost 35% of their pay.’
‘Five hundred patients are dying waiting for care at the moment, in December alone we saw 50,000 patients waiting for longer than 12 hours in accident and emergency. So the essential care they needed they waited over 12 hours for – 50,000 of them.’
Dr Mike Greenhalgh, BMA Junior Doctors Committee Co-Deputy Chair, said: ‘We’ve been trying to meet with the government for months now.
‘We’ve been in a formal trade dispute with them since October and this is our last resort. We’ve been driven to this strike action.
‘Even as late as last week we were saying to Mr Barclay that if he was to bring us a credible offer, that this strike could have been averted.’
He went on: ‘In my own area of trauma and orthopaedics we see far too often people waiting a very very long time for hip and knee replacements and I apologise to anyone who has had an operation cancelled personally.
‘But saying that, there is a new survey from Ipsos that came out this morning showing that the majority of the public do support the junior doctors strikes.
‘They know that we wouldn’t be out here if we didn’t have to be, if we hadn’t been driven to it by an unreasonable government.’
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