Junior Doctors in the UK to Launch Five-Day Strike in November

Doctors in England are set to stage a five-day strike in November, in protest over pay and employment.

Walkout Information

The British Medical Association (BMA) announced that resident doctors will walk out for five days in a row from November 14 at 7am to 7am on 19 November.

Resident doctors, who constitute about half of all doctors in the National Health Service, are proceeding with the strike after failed negotiations with the government.

Reasons Behind the Strike

The chair of the BMA’s resident doctors committee stated, “We did not want to reach this point. We have spent the last week in talks with government, urging the health secretary to end the scandal of doctors going unemployed.”

“Our survey reveals half of second-year doctors in England are facing unemployment, their skills going to waste whilst millions of patients wait endlessly for treatment and hospital shifts go unfilled. This cannot continue.”

He continued, “We negotiated sincerely, hoping the health secretary to understand that a agreement offering solutions to slowly restore the cuts to pay over a number of years, providing newly trained doctors a pay increase of only £1 per hour for the next four years.”

“We hoped the government would see that our demands are not just fair but are in the best interests of the community and our patients and would also help stop our physicians departing from the health service.”

Who Are Resident Physicians?

Junior physicians have anywhere up to eight years’ experience working as a hospital doctor, based on their field, or as many as three years in general practice.

Further information are expected soon.