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The ‘junior doctors’ or doctors in training in England will stop work for six days from Wednesday for a pay increase. Such a long strike is unprecedented in the British health system.
After three days of strike before Christmas and numerous work stoppages in recent months, the young doctors are intensifying their actions. The strike by the ‘junior doctors’, who number around 70,000 in England, started at 7 am local time (8 am in Belgium) on Wednesday morning. It will last until next Tuesday.
The strike comes as Britain’s public health system, the NHS, is struggling with a shortage of doctors and huge waiting lists. In recent months there have already been a series of unprecedented strikes by different categories of personnel. The nurses also stopped work for the first time.
The NHS is worried about the impact of the mid-winter strike, saying “almost all routine care will be disrupted”. January could be “one of the worst ever for the NHS”, says Stephen Powls, medical director of NHS England.
A ‘junior doctor’ earns about 32,000 pounds (37,000 euros) in the first year of work, the government says. Trade union BMA, which includes 46,000 doctors in training, says their wages have fallen by a quarter since 2008, taking inflation into account.
The government negotiated in the autumn to try to defuse the situation before the winter. A 3 percent pay increase was promised in early December, on top of the average 8.8 percent granted in the summer. But BMA says the government was “unable to put forward a credible proposal” that would address the loss of purchasing power.
The United Kingdom has had many strikes since mid-2022 as a result of the purchasing power crisis. Inflation was above 10 percent for a long time. However, it recently fell, reaching 3.9 percent in November.