A strike by NHS consultants over pay will bring planned care to “a virtual standstill”, a senior health leader has warned.
Professor Sir Stephen Powis, the medical director of the NHS, said the 48-hour walkout by senior doctors would cause “the most severe impact” of any strike in the health service so far.
Consultant doctors in the British Medical Association (BMA) will be on strike for 48 hours from 7am on Thursday until 7am on Saturday. It comes after just days after junior doctors staged a five-day walkout, the longest in NHS history.
As the most senior doctors in the NHS, no other clinicians can provide cover for consultants. This means planned care delivered by junior doctors that requires even remote consultant supervision will be rescheduled.
Sir Stephen said: “Consultants will not only stop seeing patients themselves, but they won’t be around to provide supervision over the work of junior doctors, which impacts thousands of appointments for patients.
“It also follows on very closely from the longest-ever junior doctors’ strike, which itself affected thousands of appointments, with back-to-back action leaving NHS services with almost no time to recover.”
More than 600,000 operations and appointments have been affected by industrial action in the NHS, which began with a strike by nurses in December.
Consultants are seeking a 35 per cent pay rise to correct a real terms fall in income since 2008.
Last week, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said that a 6 per cent pay rise agreed for public sector workers was a “final offer” and that no further negotiations would take place with unions.
Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said the strike was a “step into the unknown” and threatened efforts to clear the backlog in care.
“A consultants’ strike is something of an unknown quantity, and while there are plans in place for Christmas Day levels of cover in emergency care, the patience of patients may be tested as wider services are reduced and operations postponed. This in essence is two Christmas Days back-to-back and follows a working weeks’ worth of walkouts from other staff, so it’s very much a step into the unknown.”
Consultants on a 2003 contract earn a starting salary of £88,364 in basic pay, rising to £119,133 after around 19 years, according to the BMA.
The Department of Health and Social Care said that on average, consultants have additional earnings worth around 31 per cent of basic pay, covering “additional programmed activities”, clinical excellence awards and on-call payments, which take total average NHS earnings for 2022/23 to around £127,000.
The public is still being told to dial 999 in life-threatening emergencies and to contact NHS 111 online for other health concerns.
GP services and pharmacies will also be running as normal.
The BMA on Tuesday called on the Government to resume talks over pay to avert strikes.
In a letter to Health Secretary Steve Barclay, the union accused the Government of “not taking the situation seriously”.
It added: “The Prime Minister stated bullishly that there will be no more negotiations, as if there had been a full process already that had reached its conclusion. This is clearly not the case.
“It is still not too late, we remain willing to talk and call on you to meet with us and present us with a credible offer so that we can call off industrial action and put it to our members.”
