Resident Doctors in the UK to Begin Five Consecutive Day Walkout Next Month
Medical professionals in the UK are set to begin a five consecutive day strike in November, in protest over jobs and pay.
Strike Details
The British Medical Association (BMA) stated that junior physicians will walk out for five days in a row from November 14 at 7am to November 19 at 7am.
Resident doctors, who make up nearly 50% of all doctors in the National Health Service, are taking this action after failed negotiations with the health department.
Causes of the Walkout
The chair of the BMA’s resident doctors committee stated, “We did not want to reach this point. We have been negotiating for the past week with government, pressing the health minister to end the crisis of unemployed physicians.”
“We know from our own survey 50% of second-year physicians in the UK are struggling to find jobs, their talents being unused whilst countless individuals wait endlessly for treatment and shifts in hospitals go unfilled. This cannot continue.”
He continued, “We negotiated sincerely, hoping the minister to see that a agreement offering solutions to gradually reverse the pay reductions over several years, giving recent graduates a raise of just a pound an hour for the coming four years.”
“We hoped the government would see that our demands are not just fair but are in the interest of the community and our patients and would also help prevent our doctors departing from the health service.”
About Resident Doctors
Junior physicians have anywhere up to eight years’ experience practicing in hospitals, depending on their specialty, or up to three years in primary care.
More details are expected shortly.
