Health service to face ‘difficult Christmas’ as five-day resident doctor strike to go ahead

Resident doctor strikes planned for this week will take place as planned, with providers warning of a ‘difficult Christmas’ as a result.

The five-day walkout will start at 7am on Wednesday 17 December and end at 7am on 22 December, after the BMA rejected the Government’s latest offer.

The last-ditch attempt to avert the strike saw an offer to quadruple specialty training posts and push through emergency legislation to prioritise UK medical graduates.

However, the BMA’s resident doctors committee said the offer does not create new jobs nor promise pay restoration.

The dispute concerns resident doctor pay, GP unemployment and a lack of specialty training places.

Last week, the Government offered to create 4,000 training posts over the next three years, rather than 1,000 as promised in the 10-year plan for the NHS – with the extra positions repurposed from ‘locally employed’ roles already present in the health service. 

It also proposed pushing through emergency legislation early next year that would ‘prioritise UK medical graduates’ for these specialty training roles. 

But the union has now confirmed that in a vote over the last few days, BMA resident doctor members voted by 83% to 17% to carry on with strike action.

RDC chair Dr Jack Fletcher said: ‘Tens of thousands of frontline doctors have come together to say “no” to what is clearly too little, too late.

‘There are no new jobs in this offer – [the health secretary] has simply cannibalised those jobs which already existed for the sake of “new” jobs on paper. Neither was there anything on what Mr Streeting has said is a journey to restoring our pay – that has clearly hit the buffers.’

However, he added that this week’s strike is ‘still entirely avoidable’ and that the health secretary should now work with the BMA to ‘come up with a credible offer’ to end the jobs crisis.

Dr Fletcher added: ‘We’re willing to work to find a solution if he is. We remain committed to ensuring patient safety, as we have done with all previous rounds of strike action, and urge hospital trusts to continue planning to ensure safe staffing.

‘We will be in close contact with NHS England throughout the strikes to address safety concerns if they arise.’

In response, health secretary Wes Streeting said that the strikes are ‘self-indulgent, irresponsible and dangerous’.

He added: ‘The Government’s offer would have halved competition for jobs and put more money in resident doctors’ pockets, but the BMA has again rejected it because it doesn’t meet their ask of a further 26% pay rise.

‘Resident doctors have already had a 28.9% pay rise – there is no justification for striking just because this fantasy demand has not been met.

‘I am appealing to ordinary resident doctors to go to work this week. There is a different magnitude of risk in striking at this moment. Abandoning your patients in their hour of greatest need goes against everything a career in medicine is meant to be about.’

Chief executive of NHS Providers Daniel Elkeles said the decision will ‘inevitably result in harm to patients and damage to the NHS’.

‘We had hoped that the Government’s recent updated offer would be enough to head off another walkout at a time when so many people are suffering with flu, and the NHS needs all hands on deck.

‘Trust leaders and staff will be working now to minimise the impact of the strike, but sadly it will mean further disruption and delays, and a very difficult Christmas for the health service.’

Commenting on the pre-Christmas strikes when they were first announced, NHS England chief executive Sir Jim Mackey had called them ‘reckless’, ‘calculated’, and a risk to patient safety.