NHS England chief executive Amanda Pritchard has thanked junior doctors who returned to work during strike action over the past week.
In an internal email sent to health leaders, Pritchard praised the efforts of some NHS colleagues who worked “around the clock” to keep services running during the unprecedented six-day strike by the British Medical Association (BMA) and the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association (HCSA), which ended this morning.
Health secretary Victoria Atkins revealed that of 40 requests for junior doctors to return from picket lines, the BMA granted just two – one junior doctor for the neonatal unit at University Hospital Lewisham and a junior doctor for the obstetric unit at Nottingham University Hospitals Trust, both on 5 January.
Pritchard said in her weekly email: “I’ve heard accounts of colleagues all the way from the frontline to service and board directors working around the clock – and in unfamiliar settings –to keep services running and patients safe.
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“I include in that the many junior doctors who have chosen not to take action, or who have returned to work to ensure minimum levels of cover, whether or not formal patient safety mitigations were granted.”
The BMA accused hospitals of exaggerating how short-staffed they were in a bid to get more junior doctors to return to work during the strike.
Atkins said hospital leaders “know their patients and they know their rotas and they would only ask for mitigations if they were absolutely necessary, in, for example, a children’s emergency department”.
Yesterday she told MPs in the House of Commons that it was “not right to negotiate with unions while they are being unreasonable and some of their members are walking out of hospitals at the busiest and most challenging time of year for patients”.
The BMA is seeking full pay restoration for junior doctors, who it claims have seen a 26% real terms pay cut over the past 15 years.
Reports have suggested that the BMA rejected an additional pay rise of around 3%, on top of the 8.8% recommended by the independent pay review body last year.
No further strike action by junior doctors in England has been scheduled, but junior doctors in Wales are set to walk out for 72 hours from 15 January, while junior doctors in Northern Ireland are being balloted for a strike.
NHS Confederation chief executive Matthew Taylor said it will take NHS services time to recover from the impact of the latest strike, indicating there was a possibility that consultants who covered for their junior doctor colleagues would now be taking time off work.
“Now that the strikes are coming to an end the government and BMA should re-start negotiations and end this dispute which is having such an impact on patients and the NHS,” he said.
“Health leaders and their staff carried out extensive planning to prepare for these strikes, and their incredible, hard work over this period has kept services from buckling completely and maintained services as best as possible.”
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