England’s junior doctors hit the picket line outside hospitals as they embark on an all-out strike, the first ever in the history of NHS.
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Between 8am and 5pm today and tomorrow, the doctors at Sunderland Royal Hospital will join their colleagues across the country, who will be out on strike in protest over new contracts.
The industrial action is being carried out over a row between the British Medical Association (BMA) and the government, which is imposing a new contract on doctors.
It comes after more than 20,000 junior doctors are estimated to have walked out on Tuesday as the dispute with the Government over a new contract continues.
A spokesman for Doncaster and Bassetlaw Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust confirmed 50 non-urgent operations and 672 non-urgent outpatient appointments had been cancelled as a result of the action.
Junior doctor Tom Smart, who is a local union representative for the BMA, said: “The BMA have said to Jeremy Hunt all week that if they lift imposition, then we’ll lift the full walkout but he’s decided that’s not an option he wants to pursue”. In his BBC interview, he said it ultimately boils down to a dispute over “payment for antisocial hours, and in particular pay on Saturdays”.
Mr Hunt said the action was not “proportionate” and insisted that junior doctors would be “responsible” if patients died because of the industrial action.
The NHS said it was “pulling out all the stops” to minimise the risks to patients during the strike.
“Although strike action will cause disruption, and cause some concern for a short time, it is important to remember who has the best interest of patients at heart, and it certainly isn’t a Government that is ideologically driven to privatise our public services”.
Junior doctors (roughly the equivalent of medical residents in the U.S.) have had intermittent work stoppages over the last few months, but until now they kept working in critical areas such as emergency, maternity and intensive care.
For the first time in the health service’s history, it has experienced its first all-out strike, affecting emergency cover with more than 125,000 appointments and operations cancelled.
STRIKING junior doctors left the picket line outside Poole Hospital yesterday to help treat a fellow protestor who had collapsed.
“What history judges is: did you take the tough and hard decisions that enabled the NHS to deliver high-quality care for patients?”
Tina Thekkekara, aged 36, a junior doctor working in paediatrics at Sheffield Children’s Hospital since 2007, said: “We are all very sad and demoralised we have had to reach this point”.
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“You can disagree with the government’s vision for a seven-day NHS but is it proportionate or appropriate to withdraw emergency care from vulnerable patients, because that’s what’s happening today”.
