Junior doctors in England set to hold 3-day strike as pay battle escalates

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Junior doctors in England will walk out for three days from Wednesday in a significant escalation of their battle for a 35 per cent pay rise, as the health service grapples with one of its toughest winters on record.

The NHS said the latest round of industrial action would affect “almost all routine care”, as consultants are asked to step in for their junior doctor colleagues, who make up about half of the medical workforce.

The strike will end at 7am on December 23, leaving the health service to prioritise urgent and emergency care for 72 hours. Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said it had temporarily closed the accident and emergency department at Cheltenham hospital as a result of the action. 

Health leaders have expressed concern about the effect of another stoppage on the service as it responds to additional strain brought on by winter.

The wave of strikes that started in December 2022 have compounded pressures on the NHS, with about 1.2mn operations and appointments cancelled since it began.

After five weeks of talks with ministers, the British Medical Association, the main doctors’ union, said this month that junior doctors would walk out between December 20 and December 23, and between January 3 and January 9.

Junior doctors in Wales have also announced a three-day strike over pay from January 15.

Professor Sir Stephen Powis, national medical director of NHS England, said the stoppage from Wednesday would cause “huge disruption” across the service and put it “on the back foot”.

Sir Julian Hartley, chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents health organisations across England, said further strikes meant trust leaders’ “worst fears have been realised” this winter.

“This is the last thing the NHS needs,” he said in a statement. “With the longest strike in NHS history planned for the new year, and senior medics having to cover for striking junior doctors, quality of care will be affected with efforts to cut waiting lists further dented by these walkouts.”

Last month, the BMA agreed to support a pay offer by the government to senior consultants, which included a 4.95 per cent “investment in pay” for the 2023-24 financial year, adding to the 6 per cent already offered.

Health secretary Victoria Atkins has said that if the strikes were called off, the government would “immediately look to come back to the table to continue negotiations”.

Robert Laurenson and Vivek Trivedi, co-chairs of the BMA junior doctors’ committee, said they had been “encouraged” by Atkins’ insistence “last week that even after our mutually agreed deadline had passed and we were forced to call new strikes, we had still not heard her ‘final offer’”.

“We have spent the last two weeks awaiting this final offer in the hope it would be the long-awaited credible offer we could put to our members,” they said. “Unfortunately, we are still yet to hear it.”

Downing Street said the strikes would have a “significant impact” on patients, adding: “We would encourage junior doctors to consider carefully the extremely significant impact striking at such a challenging time will have, both on the NHS and for individual patients, and to return to talks.”

Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said: “The prospect of A&E departments closing thanks to Rishi Sunak’s failure to end NHS strikes will send shivers down patients’ spines.

“The Conservatives must now stop playing politics with our NHS, get around the table with junior doctors, and negotiate an end to these strikes,” he added.