UK Junior Doctors Start Three-Day Walkout Amid Prolonged Pay Dispute

(Bloomberg) — Junior doctors in England begin a 3-day walkout as their months-long pay dispute drags on, adding to pressure on the National Health Service and dealing another blow to Rishi Sunak’s pledge to cut waiting lists.

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It’s the latest move by junior doctors with the British Medical Association to try to force Sunak’s government to award a more generous pay deal to make up for years of real-terms cuts. They also plan a record six-day strike in early January, which the NHS said would cause “weeks of major disruption.”

Doctors were awarded a 6% pay rise earlier this year, with bonuses for the most junior trainees. But the BMA has been campaigning for the government to reverse pay erosion of 26% in real terms that it says junior doctors have faced since 2008. This week’s action will bring to 28 the number of days junior doctors have been on strike this year, according to the association.

The government has been gradually reaching pay settlements to end a long period of industrial action that has crippled public services at various times. But Sunak on Tuesday expressed frustration at the doctors’ holdout, telling Parliament they are hampering progress on getting NHS waiting lists down.

Since he made his promise — one of five that he’s asked voters to judge him by — the number of patients waiting for treatment has risen by about half a million to 7.7 million. Sunak told lawmakers the strikes are “disappointing,” especially after the government had resolved disputes with consultants and nurses.

He has repeatedly said that bigger pay rises risk stoking inflation that has more than halved this year but remains at more than double the official 2% target.

“The question more is for the junior doctors, as to why they are refusing to accept something that everyone else is now accepting, on top of having a pay increase which is more generous than anyone else’s set by the independent body going into this,” Sunak said, when asked in a parliamentary committee about the rise in waiting lists since he made his pledge.

But the BMA pushed back and called on the government to “invest in the expertise required” to give patients necessary care and reduce waiting lists. “A health service in which pay declines in real terms every year is not a sustainable — or healthy — health service,” Robert Laurenson and Vivek Trivedi, junior doctors committee co-chairs at the association, said in a statement.

NHS National Medical Director Stephen Powis said the strikes will cause “huge disruption” and put the health service “on the back foot into the New Year, which is a time where we see demand start to rise significantly.”

Still, Powis said people who need medical help should continue to call for assistance. Health Secretary Victoria Atkins said authorities have taken contingency measures to minimize disruption from the strikes.

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