Young doctors began a six-day strike in England on Wednesday morning, an unprecedented length for the British public health system, which is already exhausted.
This January could be “one of the worst starts to the year” that the NHS, the British public health system, has experienced, warned an NHS official, Stephen Powis, who called on patients not to give up care for all that.
After numerous walkouts in recent months, the “junior doctors” – doctors with a status close to that of interns in Quebec – who are demanding salary increases, are toughening up their mobilization, due to lack of agreement reached with the government in the face of the crisis caused by inflation.
“SOS NHS,” reads a sign on a picket line outside St. Thomas Hospital in central London. “Junior doctors are overworked and underpaid,” according to another.
The new strike by these doctors, of whom there are nearly 70,000 in England, comes at a time when the NHS is experiencing a hemorrhage of doctors and is struggling to reduce the gigantic waiting lists for patients.
“We have huge waiting lists because we don’t have enough doctors, the answer is not to cut our salaries and scare us away,” Robert Laurenson, a committee official, told AFP. “junior doctors” from the BMA union.
“The strike is the only thing this government listens to,” he added.
“There will be no doctors left” if the government does not agree to raise salaries, said Hamish Bain, a 30-year-old doctor, explaining that several of his colleagues had emigrated to Australia and the United States. An increase is necessary to bring them back “from abroad”.
The NHS is concerned about the consequences of this movement in the middle of winter, explaining that “almost all routine care will be disrupted”.
According to the daily The Timesa million appointments were canceled in total because of strikes by “junior doctors”.
Canceled appointments
“January is the busiest time of the year for the NHS, so these strikes will have a huge impact on our health system,” criticized Health Minister Victoria Atkins on Wednesday, calling on doctors to “return to the negotiating table.
A “junior doctor” earns around 32,000 pounds sterling (54,000 Canadian dollars) during their first year of practice, notes the government.
According to the BMA (British Medical Association) union, salaries have fallen by almost a quarter since 2008, taking into account inflation.
The government negotiated for five weeks in the fall to try to resolve the situation before the tense winter period. He offered them a 3% salary increase at the beginning of December, in addition to the 8.8% average increase already granted this summer.
But the BMA believes that this would not cover the drop in purchasing power suffered in recent years and is calling for increases of up to 35% spread over several years.
A category of experienced doctors, “consultants”, recently obtained an increase ranging from 6% to 19.6%, on which members of the BMA union have yet to vote.
For more than a year, the NHS has been facing a series of historic strikes by various categories of its staff, including for the first time nurses.
The United Kingdom has experienced numerous strikes since mid-2022 due to the purchasing power crisis. Long stuck above 10%, inflation recently stalled and stood at 3.9% year-on-year in November.