🔗 Share this article

Doctors in England are preparing to begin a five-day strike in November, in protest over jobs and pay.

Strike Details

The British Medical Association (BMA) announced that junior physicians will strike for five days in a row from 7am on 14 November to November 19 at 7am.

Junior physicians, who make up about half of all medical staff in the NHS, are proceeding with the strike after failed negotiations with the government.

Reasons Behind the Strike

The chair of the BMA’s resident doctors committee stated, “We did not want to reach this point. We have spent the last week in talks with government, pressing the health minister to resolve the scandal of doctors going unemployed.”

“We know from our own survey half of second-year doctors in the UK are facing unemployment, their skills going to waste whilst millions of patients wait endlessly for treatment and hospital shifts go unfilled. This is a situation which cannot go on.”

He continued, “We negotiated sincerely, hoping the health secretary to see that a deal offering solutions to slowly restore the cuts to pay over a number of years, providing recent graduates a pay increase of just a pound an hour for the coming four years.”

“We trusted the authorities would see that our asks are not just reasonable but are in the interest of the community and our patients and would also help stop our doctors leaving the health service.”

About Resident Doctors

Resident doctors have anywhere up to eight years’ experience working as a hospital doctor, depending on their specialty, or as many as three years in primary care.

Further information will follow shortly.