Trainee doctors announce 72-hour strike dates in March to secure 30% pay rise

Thousands of junior doctors are set to strike on March 13 in a 72-hour strike that will further cripple the NHS.

Union leaders today confirmed the massive action in England will be a “full strike”, including a refusal by medics to staff emergency rooms.

Young doctors are known as the ‘backbone of the NHS’ because of their day-to-day work in healthcare, as they offer experienced medical professionals the opportunity to deal with very special patients or more complex cases.

Health leaders fear the strike, which will affect up to 47,000 junior doctors, could be the most damaging yet and lead to the cancellation of another 100,000 NHS operations.

With the announcement of the strike dates, Dr. Rob Laurenson and Dr. Vivek Trivedi, co-chairman of the British Medical Association (BMA) Junior Doctors Committee, said the public must hold the government accountable for the union’s actions.

The British Medical Association announced a 72-hour strike in March

“Make no mistake, this strike was absolutely within the government’s ability to avert; They know, we know, and our patients need to know too,” they said.

“Since last summer we have been trying to get all the health ministers we had to the negotiating table.

“We have written many times and were even confident yesterday that Steve Barclay would see the need to come together with us to find a workable solution that could have prevented this strike.”

It follows a 98% vote to strike wages among the BMA’s young PhD students, who can earn up to £58,000 a year.

BMA officials cited the government’s recent decision to enter into collective bargaining with the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) but not other health unions as a factor in prompting them to announce the strike dates.

“We were not told why we were not offered intensive negotiations, nor what we had to do to get the government to negotiate with us,” they said.

“How on earth can the health secretary bury his head in the sand and hope that this crisis his government has caused will somehow go away if he doesn’t hit us?

“It won’t, and patients and the public will continue to bear the brunt of his inaction until he starts dealing with us and we agree on a deal that really values ​​young doctors and pays us what we’re worth. ” “

The BMA has been campaigning to ensure young doctors get not only an inflation-busting pay rise, but also a “wage refund” for what they describe as years of pay stagnation.

This represents an enormous 30 per cent increase, a number ministers have called “unrealistic” and warned it would “put patients at risk”.

The BMA’s announcement brings the total number of NHS strike days in March to six.

This does not include the three-day strike the RCN has suspended since No10 agreed to pay for calls.

NHS ambulance crews are planning strikes for March 6, 8 and 20.

The Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association (HCSA) has also announced that it will extend its planned March 15 strike to March 13-14 to join forces with the BMA.

And the British Dental Association also announced that hospital dentists would be “under scrutiny” for 72 hours during the BMA strike.

The announcement of more strikes is another blow to the healthcare system this winter after a series of industrial action by various groups of workers in recent months.

Almost 140,000 operations and appointments have been canceled this winter due to NHS strikes. That number includes the largest-ever strike to disrupt ailing health services on February 6, involving tens of thousands of nurses and paramedics.

Ambulance workers, physiotherapists and nurses have launched several strikes as part of a long-running pay dispute with the government.

The combined strike action led to the NHS hospital Cancel from 140,000 NHS surgeries and appointments to date.

Health leaders said a strike by junior doctors could be even worse for the NHS than previous strikes, given the way junior doctors work across a wide range of healthcare specialists and services, including emergency care.

Steve Barclay, Minister for Health, earlier described the decision of the junior medics to strike as “extremely disappointing”.

Since 2019/20, pay has risen by “cumulative 8.2 per cent”.

The last time doctors in training went on a picket line was in 2016.

At the time, ministers planned to scrap overtime rates for junior doctors on all days except Sundays and instead increase overall wages.

However, many junior doctors believed that the change would result in a net loss.

The dispute led to a general strike on 12 January, the first industrial action in 40 years. Strikes also took place on 10 February and 9-10 March 2016.

On April 26-27, junior doctors stopped both routine and emergency care, for the first time ever.

Overall, the strikes resulted in the cancellation of 100,000 jobs.

Formally, the dispute did not end until 2019, when the prospective doctors were offered a salary increase of 8.2 percent over four years.