Doctors down surgical tools and line the streets outside the hospitals they have spent their burgeoning careers serving. Patients brace themselves for disappointing calls, again postponing long-awaited procedures.
On the signs they hold aloft at picket lines across the country, doctors are warning of another impending catastrophe for the NHS. ‘Pay or we fly away’, read one banner at the recent Manchester Royal Infirmary picket - complete with details of a first-year doctors’ salary in the UK, numbers outstripped by the wages offered by Canada, New Zealand, France and Australia.
Staff are leaving to go elsewhere - that’s not a completely new phenomenon, but the numbers leaving seem higher than in previous years and are expected to come with a higher rate of people not coming back to the UK at all. The exodus also now includes the most senior medics, the Manchester Evening News can reveal - and that is new, according to leading doctors.
