On 7 April, resident doctors in the BMA (British Medical Association) began six days of strike action over pay and jobs. Doctors are standing firm in the face of massive propaganda from the Labour government and right-wing media.
In his determination to defeat the doctors, Labour health secretary Wes Streeting has cut 1,000 training places – that’s lasting damage done to the NHS.
“How long do you think it would take to clear the NHS backlog at current rates?” one striking doctor at Bristol Royal Infirmary asked Tom Baldwin. The answer was 690 years!
Some of the pickets were facing possible unemployment before the end of the year. For psychiatry, there are 20 applicants for every post, and just eight spots for anaesthetists in the whole of South West England. One striker had started his first year as part of an intake of 80 – six years later, only eight of them are still practising medicine in the UK.
Striking resident doctors on the Leeds General Infirmary picket line described Wes Streeting’s withdrawal of specialism training places for doctors as a “scorched-earth policy”. They told Iain Dalton that the NHS is desperately short of specialists yet this summer doctors are unemployed because they haven’t been able to access training to further their careers.
“They can’t find the £1 billion they would need for pay restoration, but can find billions to mobilise the armed forces in case they decide to send them to join in Trump’s war in Iran.”
At Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, David Ellis reports plenty of support from patients and visitors to the hospital, one of whom told the strikers: “Doctors save lives, you should be on footballers’ wages”. Doctors themselves said how the threat to cancel the offer of more training places alongside an inadequate pay offer had only stoked anger among BMA members.
