Catastrophic winter pressure on the NHS prompted junior doctors to ballot for strike action, the co-chair of the British Medical Association junior doctors committee said as members began a five-day walkout.
Rob Laurenson told Radio 4’s Today programme the doctors had chosen to ballot after last winter “because year on year we’ve been saying that winters are catastrophic and that there are dangers”.
Junior doctors began a five-day strike in England on Thursday, in what is being called the longest walkout of its kind in NHS history. It comes amid continuing protests over pay in the health service.
Laurenson added: “And now, what we’ve realised is that people are compartmentalising this sense of crisis in the NHS to winters alone. It is true that there will at least be one hospital in the country that is severely understaffed any single day of the year, and its the government’s responsibility to be able to facilitate the environment for healthcare to be delivered at high standards to the people of this country.”
As the strikes began it was announced that NHS waiting lists in England had climbed to record levels. Figures released on Thursday showed that 7.47 million people were waiting to start routine hospital treatment at the end of May, up from 7.42 million at the end of April. It is the highest number since records began in August 2007.
In May, 385,022 people had been waiting more than 52 weeks to start routine hospital treatment, up from 371,111 at the end of April. During the same period, 11,446 people were estimated to have been waiting 18 months to start treatment, down slightly from 11,477. The government and NHS England have set the ambition of eliminating all waits of more than a year by March 2025.
The strikes are being held amid speculation that the government will say whether it is going to accept recommendations from pay review bodies affecting public sector workers including NHS workers, teachers and civil servants, and that the bodies have recommended rises of 6%-6.5%.
Junior doctors’ leaders at the British Medical Association have threatened to keep striking until next spring if they get a renewed legal mandate, unless Steve Barclay, the health secretary, makes them a “credible offer”.
The BMA is calling for “full restoration” of pay, which it says has been cut by 26%. The government has offered 5%, with BMA leaders urging it to return to the negotiating table.
In a separate statement, Laurenson and his co-chair, Dr Vivek Trivedi, said: “Today marks the start of the longest single walkout by doctors in the NHS’s history, but this is still not a record that needs to go into the history books.
“We can call this strike off today if the UK government will simply follow the example of the government in Scotland and drop their nonsensical precondition of not talking whilst strikes are announced, and produce an offer which is credible to the doctors they are speaking with.
“The pay offer on the table to junior doctors in Scotland – and how it was reached – throws into sharp relief the obstinate approach being taken by the prime minister and the health secretary, Steve Barclay.”
The offer in Scotland involves an extra 3% in backdated pay on top of last year’s 4.5% award and a rise of 6.5% this year, taking the cumulative increase to 14.5% over two years.
Health bosses in England privately told Rishi Sunak his pledge to cut NHS waiting times would be impossible to meet if strikes continued to disrupt care beyond the summer. The prime minister promised in January that NHS waiting lists would fall as one of hisfive pledges, which he said reflected “the people’s priorities” by which voters should judge his performance.
