Resident doctors in England will walk out on Friday after the health secretary failed to make any substantive proposal on both pay and non-pay elements, according to the British Medical Association.
BMA resident doctors committee co-chairs Melissa Ryan and Ross Nieuwoudt said yesterday that they had come to talks with Wes Streeting and his officials in “good faith, keen to explore real solutions to the problems facing resident doctors today,” but that they “did not receive an offer that would meet the scale of those challenges.”
They said: “While we were happy to discuss non-pay issues that affect doctors’ finances, we have always been upfront that this is, at its core, a pay dispute. The simplest and most direct means of restoring the more than a fifth of our pay that has eroded since 2008 is to raise our pay. While we were keen to discuss other items, it was made very clear by the government that this obvious course of action was going to remain off the table.”
Strike action
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Streeting appeals to resident doctors to vote against strikes
Streeting wrote to the BMA earlier on Tuesday, offering to continue talks if the strike was postponed, but the BMA said what was up for discussion was not enough and achieving better pay remained the key issue.
The health secretary said the union had “recklessly and needlessly” opted for strike action.
Ryan and Nieuwoudt said: “Student debt and the cost of training remain crushing burdens on the finances of resident doctors. We had hoped that there would be enough new ideas about relieving these burdens that we could make some progress in these talks.
“Disappointingly, what we saw would not have been significant enough to change the day-to-day financial situation for our members. The non-pay aspects of last year’s pay deal have still not been delivered, which has shaken the confidence of our members that any further non-pay elements would be honoured.”
Resident – formerly junior – doctors in England are scheduled to walk out for five days from 7:00am on Friday 25 July.
Patient safety concerns
The lack of any breakthrough comes after the BMA warned that changes to NHS strike planning could risk patient safety.
In previous rounds of strike action, it had been agreed that elective or scheduled procedures would be postponed to free up senior doctors to cover for resident doctors in emergency and urgent care.
However, for the strikes due to begin on Friday, NHS England chief executive Sir Jim Mackey has instructed hospitals to continue scheduled, non-urgent care.
The BMA wrote to Mackey outlining concerns that this change in policy will cause frustration and confusion for hospital leaders and potentially put patients at risk.
In the letter, BMA council chair Dr Tom Dolphin and deputy council chair Dr Emma Runswick, said that hospital care “must adapt on strike days to the levels of staff available”.
“Your decision to instruct hospitals to run non-urgent planned care stretches safe staffing far too thinly, and risks not only patient safety in urgent and emergency situations, but in planned care too.
“It also appears designed to lead to far more late, same-day cancellations for patients. Consultants cannot safely provide elective care and cover for residents at the same time.”
They added that many hospital leaders were “equally worried” about the change in staffing policy – an agreement that has been in place with NHS England since 2015.
It continued: “We therefore strongly urge you to reconsider your instructions to hospitals, which should be preparing now to postpone non-urgent planned activity in order to provide a safe urgent and emergency service in keeping with the levels of staff available.”
The BMA also referred to a national “derogations” process where hospitals can request striking doctors to return to work if there is an unforeseen emergency or mass casualty event.
The union said it was still committed to this, but urged NHS England not to use this process to handle non-urgent care booked in for strike days.
This article was updated on 23 July following news on the outcome of talks. Additional reporting by Rob Moss
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