Health Secretary Wes Streeting said resident doctors had shown ‘complete disdain for patients’ but the BMA accused ministers of failing to address the challenges faced by medics
Doctors strikes will go ahead on Friday after talks to avoid a five-day walkout in England broke down.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting said the British Medical Association’s (BMA) resident doctors had “recklessly and needlessly opted for strike action” – and shown a “complete disdain for patients”. In a fiery statement, he claimed the action is “completely unjustified, completely unprecedented in the history of British trade unionism”.
But the BMA said the Government had failed to address the scale of the challenges faced by medics after ministers refused to reopen pay talks for this year. The union added: “We want to keep talking – but we don’t accept we can’t talk about pay.”
It means that resident doctors – formerly known as junior doctors – will go on strike across England from 7am on Friday for five days. Previous walkouts saw hundreds of thousands of appointments and planned procedures cancelled.
READ MORE: Rachel Reeves warns striking doctors to step back from brink – ‘I’m disappointed’
BMA resident doctors committee co-chairs Dr Melissa Ryan and Dr Ross Nieuwoudt said they had been trying urgently to reach a compromise in recent days to avert strike action.
They said in a statement: “We have always said that no doctor wants to strike and all it would take to avoid it is a credible path to pay restoration offered by the Government. We came to talks in good faith, keen to explore real solutions to the problems facing resident doctors today.
“Unfortunately, we did not receive an offer that would meet the scale of those challenges. While we were happy to discuss non-pay issues that affect doctors’ finances we have always been upfront that this is at its core a pay dispute.
“The simplest and most direct means of restoring the more than a fifth of our pay that has eroded since 2008 is to raise our pay. While we were keen to discuss other items, it was made very clear by the Government that this obvious course of action was going to remain off the table.”
The Health Secretary said there was an opportunity for the union “to work with us on a range of options that would have made a real difference to resident doctors’ working conditions and created extra roles to deal with the bottlenecks that hold back their career progression”.
“Instead, they have recklessly and needlessly opted for strike action,” he said. “The BMA would have lost nothing by taking up the offer to postpone strike action to negotiate a package that would improve the working lives of resident doctors.
“By refusing to do so, they will cause unnecessary disruption to patients, put additional pressure on their NHS colleagues and not take the opportunity to improve their own working conditions. All of my attention will be now on averting harm to patients and supporting NHS staff at work.
“After a 28.9% pay hike in the last three years and the highest pay rise in the public sector two years in a row, strike action is completely unjustified, completely unprecedented in the history of British trade unionism and shows a complete disdain for patients and the wider recovery of the NHS.”
A recent YouGov poll showed a dip in public support for the strikes. Around half (52%) of people in the UK “somewhat oppose” (20%) or “strongly oppose” (32%) the move, while a third (34%) of the 4,954 adults surveyed either “somewhat support” (23%) or “strongly support” (11%) doctor strikes.
YouGov said the proportion supporting the strike over pay has dropped five points since it last asked the question in May, when 48% opposed the strikes and 39% supported them.
NHS Providers, which represents hospital trusts, hit back at the union’s claims that health leaders were putting patients at risk, saying it was the “costly” BMA strike that was risking patient care.
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