NHS strikes: Services under pressure as junior doctors begin longest ever strike action

NHS strikes: Services under pressure as junior doctors begin longest ever strike action

What do you wanton when do you win now day one of this unprecedented six- day strike action and for thousands of Junior doctors in England 2024 begins where 2023 left off on the picket line this was the scene in central London this morning as it was outside hospitals

Around the country such as here in Bristol personally how are you feeling about taking this action well personally uh I’d you know I’d rather the government come and negotiate you know as a doctor we’d rather go and treat patients we don’t want to take industrial action but we’ve suffered so

Much in terms of pay erosion all we want is full pay Restoration in other words a 35% pay rise to make up for previous below inflation Rises an extra 3% on top of the average of nearly 9% received last year was being discussed before talks broke down and so this dispute drags on

Eliciting yet more warnings the charity age UK claimed it would be difficult to guarantee safe and effective care for everyone given the timing and duration of the strike a time when hospitals have been facing sharp rises in cases of flu NHS leaders in England say they have

Contingency plans in place for this with resources focused on the most urgent and emergency care but that comes of course at a cost to other health services es the last 3-day Junior doctor strike in England resulted in more than 80,000 operations and appointments being cancelled and rescheduled and that

Figure this time is set to be much higher and the impact already is noticeable says the body which represents NHS organizations well we’re hearing from certain parts of the country that it’s exacerbating issues around discharge of patients from as it were the the back door of the hospital and of course then

That impacts the front door of the hospital and the weights that people have got to have an Ane which ultimately impacts ambulance response times so what we’re hearing is it’s increasing those pressures uh which ultimately does of course um lead to to to real issues around patient safety someone’s just

Walked past us now and and said to you get back to work um are you worried that public support for your actions as the sort of magnitude of their canceled operations and appointments sinks in might begin to wne you know I’d like to apologize to anyone who feels this way

But this has been occurring even before industrial action has taken place you know the the NHS has been in crisis as you can see in the picking line we’ve had multiple you know support from you know as you can see right now the cars are beeping showing support the public

Know the truth the patients know the truth that doctors are undervalued and it’s within the government’s hand and resp responsibility to stop the strike action the government says it won’t negotiate while strikes are ongoing so there are no plans to meet uh union leaders in the next week in the diary

Well it is up to them to call off the strikes you know they decided they picked this week uh which we all know is one of the busiest weeks in the nhs’s diary we have Corona virus we have flu we have noro virus increasing they picked this week uh to call this

Industrial action still come calls for both sides to return to talks immediately I think my members I think the public I think on the people who work in the NHS would kind of say to both sides look this is not a time for worrying about about your pride about standing on ceremony

Actually if either the BMA or government was to do something to enable talks to start I think the public would be incredibly grateful and and to be honest there’s no reason why that can’t happen you now this evening tomorrow but there is little sign of of any such movement in Northern Ireland

Junior doctors will soon vote on action while in Wales in 12 days time another Junior doctor strike begins well the co-chair of the bma’s junior doctor committee drct VI exra bety joins me now from Manchester thank you so much for joining us I just wanted to start on that BMA letter tonight

Which said that it was astonishing that insufficient planning had happened at some Trust what should NHS England’s response be to that so I think the main thing the L is trying to get across is that we’re trying to work with the NHS and have worked with them uh over the last eight

Rounds of strike action to make sure we’re addressing any patient safety issues or staffing issues that crop up where but when that process isn’t being engaged back with us it makes it more difficult and all we want to do uh is ultimately you know get an offer that’s

Acceptable to our members to reverse the pay cuts that we’ve had unfortunately strike action is the only language that the government seems to understand uh but we want that strike action to be a smooth as possible of course it disrupts uh elective activity but we want it to

Be as smooth as possible and that’s why we’ wanted to work with the NHS to to provide this level of safety so it’s frustrating isn’t reciprocated sorry to cut across you just talking about some of that disruption we’re seeing one Hospital’s declared a critical incident there’s significant weights in A&E one

Department’s waiting 11 hours to be seen how responsible do you feel for what is already happening right now so weights of 11 hours are actually less than weights of more than 24 hours that we’re seeing across a& on days without strike action uh in the introduction to this uh piece there was

A a message that said that 880,000 appointments were disrupted because of our strike action in December well our strike action so far has caused A disruption of of roughly 1.2 million appointments in the year 2223 when largely there was no doctor strike action at all there were more than 12 million Hospital appointments

That had to be uh cancelled and hopefully rescheduled but where is the government or anyone doing anything about that when we have people like the Royal College of radiology saying that we’re even failing our Cancer Care patients because we don’t have a Workforce that’s able to treat them so

All we want to do is to restore the value of being a doctor to reverse the pay cuts that doctors like myself and the ones that I have represented uh have faced over the past 15 years for doctors who are paid £550 an hour to be paid

Just over2 an hour so that we can keep them here rather than then rather than them fleeing to places like Australia or New Zealand I just wonder how you feel today because as a doctor you went into the profession to help people and this is arguably one of the worst times

Of the year that is what the health secretary said as well this is a really difficult time so how does it sit with you that you’re not able to help people so it’s a difficult decision to go on strike for any doctor at any time

Of the year I I wish we didn’t have to be on strike I wish we didn’t have to strike at all uh but in fact we’ve had to because the government has simply not listen to us in fact before we had any strike action we called for the

Government to meet us to talk talk about pay and the effects that repeated pay cuts have on our Workforce but they ignored us but Victoria has said today she wants a fair and reasonable solution to end the strikes once and for all so it sounds like she’s making a deal so why

Won’t you come to the table so we never left the table we had a series of negotiations in uh November and early part of December and we had a pre-agreed deadline from both sides and when we reached that deadline the offer that was on the table the average 3%

Would have still been a real terms pay cut for many doctors that’s why our committee unanimously decided to reject that offer and to call for further strike action now we called for this set of strike action almost a month ago and in that time we’ve heard Victoria Atkins

Say that that actually wasn’t the final offer and there was a further offer to be made but it’s been a month and we’ve still not seen that further offer all we’ve ever wanted is an offer that’s credible that we can put to our members uh that they would hopefully accept to

Bring this dispute to an end now if there is an offer that could have been that why was that not presented we could have avoided this set of strikes and all future strikes

The British Medical Association has tonight accused NHS managers of failing to plan properly and protect patients during its members’ six day walkout – saying the scheme used to call doctors off the picket line and into work if there’s an emergency is at risk of collapse.

Tens of thousands of junior doctors in England have joined the unprecedented strike action – with hospitals reporting “significant demand” for services – with one NHS trust describing 11 hour waits at A&E.