The strike ‘threatens to wipe out a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fix our national health service’, warns one NHS boss
Doctors are walking out this week(Image: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publis)
An NHS boss has warned that this week’s doctors’ strikes could ‘trample on hard-won’ progress in the NHS.
The ‘timing could hardly be worse’ for strikes starting this week ‘barring some miraculous intervention’, said NHS Providers chief executive, Daniel Elkeles.
“Not just because of looming winter pressures, the disruption and division in the wider workforce, or the increased delays and distress for patients,” he told the NHS Providers Conference today (November 11) at Manchester Central Convention Centre.
But because the ‘green shoots of the NHS recovery are taking root’, explained the health leader.
“They are tentative and fragile, they need nurturing, but they are real.
“Strikes in the NHS at any time would be a serious setback, but coming now it threatens to wipe out a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fix our national health service.”
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Doctors in England will go on strike for five days in November, starting this week, in an ongoing row over jobs and pay.
The British Medical Association (BMA) said resident doctors will strike on five consecutive days from 7am on November 14 to 7am on November 19.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting described the move as “preposterous” and accused the BMA of “blocking a better deal for doctors”.
Resident doctors, previously named junior doctors, make up around half of all doctors in the NHS.
“Nobody for one minute underestimates the scale of the problems posed by long delays including corridor care, alongside financial pressures and a relentless increase in demand,” continued Mr Elkeles during the opening address at the Manchester event this morning.
“And it’s clear that progress is uneven. Some trusts, mainly district general hospitals – through no fault of their own – have a bigger and steeper hill to climb.
“More staff walkouts would trample on these hard-won gains, at a terrible cost.”
The chief executive, who runs the NHS Providers membership organisation for the NHS hospital, mental health, community and ambulance services, said it’s not just resident doctors who are dissatisfied.
He said the government’s upcoming 10-year workforce plan for the NHS needs a ‘actually a whole reset on pay, benefits and pensions for every group of staff in the NHS’.
“Let’s face it, it’s not just resident doctors who are dissatisfied currently,
“There are plenty of other staff groups whose unions are making a forceful case for a better deal and it feels that this year’s pay round is going to bring these to a head.”
Dr Jack Fletcher, chairman of the BMA’s resident doctors committee (RDC), said: “This is not where we wanted to be.
“We have spent the last week in talks with Government, pressing the Health Secretary to end the scandal of doctors going unemployed.
“We know from our own survey half of second year doctors in England are struggling to find jobs, their skills going to waste whilst millions of patients wait endlessly for treatment, and shifts in hospitals go unfilled. This is a situation which cannot go on.
“We talked with the Government in good faith – keen for the Health Secretary to see that a deal that included options to gradually reverse the cuts to pay over several years, giving newly trained doctors a pay increase of just a pound an hour for the next four years.
“We hoped the Government would see that our asks are not just reasonable but are in the best interests of the public and our patients, and would also help stop our doctors leaving the NHS.
“Better employment prospects and restoring pay are a credible way forward that would work for doctors, work for Government, and work for our patients.
“The Health Secretary’s 11th hour letter to us today makes vague promises for some degree of change to jobs and training for two years hence, showing little understanding of the crisis here and now, or a real commitment to fix it.
“While we want to get a deal done, the Government seemingly does not, leaving us with little option but to call for strike action.”
Mr Streeting said the walkouts are “unreasonable and unnecessary” and “do not have the public’s support, nor did a majority of resident doctors vote for them”.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting (Image: PA)
He added: “It is preposterous that the BMA have rushed headlong into more damaging strike action a week after its new leadership opened discussions with the Government.
“After resident doctors have received a 28.9% pay rise, the Government has been clear that we simply cannot go further on pay this year.
“But by walking out on strike, the BMA are walking away from an offer to improve resident doctors’ working conditions and create more specialty training roles to progress their careers. The BMA are blocking a better deal for doctors.
The Health Secretary also warned that “the BMA’s reckless posturing will harm patients, leave other doctors and NHS staff to pick up the pieces and divert resources away from rebuilding the NHS”.
“We will not allow the BMA to wreck the NHS’s recovery,” he said.
“I urge the BMA to call off these needless strikes and come back to the table. They have a Government that wants to work with them to improve the working lives of resident doctors and create an NHS fit for the future.”
Resident doctors have anywhere up to eight years’ experience working as a hospital doctor, depending on their specialty, or up to three years in general practice.