More strike misery to come as junior doctors announce next five-day walkout – their TENTH in a year
JUNIOR doctors will strike for five days at the end of the month, union bosses have announced.
Medics will take to the picket lines again from 7am on February 24 to midnight on February 28, the British Medical Association said.
The union said it was forced to call for more industrial action after the Government “failed to meet the deadline to put an improved pay offer on the table”.
Health Secretary Victoria Atkins said the next set of strike dates showed junior doctors are not “ready to be reasonable”.
She said: “I want to find a reasonable solution that ends strike action.
“We already provided them with a pay increase of up to 10.3 per cent and were prepared to go further. We urged them to put an offer to their members, but they refused.
“We are also open to further discussions on improving doctors’ and the wider workforce’s working lives.
“I want to focus on cutting waiting times for patients rather than industrial action. We have been making progress with waiting lists falling for three months in a row.
“Five days of action will put enormous pressure on the NHS and is not in the spirit of constructive dialogue.
“To make progress I ask the Junior Doctors Committee to cancel their action and come back to the table to find a way forward for patients and our NHS.”
It is the tenth strike since March 2023 and will be the third longest at five full days.
The walkout will mean the trainee medics have refused to work for 39 days in the past year – almost six weeks’ worth of labour.
Dr Robert Laurenson, of the BMA, said: “The glacial speed of progress with the Government is frustrating and incomprehensible.
“We have made every effort to work with the Government in finding a fair solution to this dispute whilst trying to avoid strike action.
“This will be the last action of our current mandate, but we are already balloting for six months more. Even now we are willing to put off these strikes to find a solution – it’s in the Health Secretary’s hands.”
More than 1.1million appointment cancelled already
In the last strike in January an average of 25,600 medics were missing in action on each weekday, along with 8,100 on the weekend.
More than 1.1million NHS appointments have already been cancelled because of junior doctors’ strikes alone.
The January walkout hit 19,000 appointments per day, meaning another 97,000 could be rescheduled due to this month’s strike.
In a joint statement with Dr Vivek Trivedi, he added: “The Health Secretary was quite clear in media interviews during our last action that she would meet us ‘in twenty minutes’ when no strikes were planned.
“ It turned out to be more than twenty days before we were offered a meeting with a minister. When we did it wasn’t with the Health Secretary, and there was no offer on the table.
“Time has been lost that could have been used to negotiate with us, or at least with the Treasury and the Prime Minister for the mandate to make a credible offer.”