Five-day walkouts are planned every month until the end of the year as the dispute over working contracts rumbles on.
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Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said the walkouts would see 100,000 operations and around one million appointments affected, and described it as “a devastating strike, the like of which the NHS has never seen before”.
Junior doctors in England will take part in fresh industrial action over a new contract that ministers are imposing on them, union leaders say.
The Patients Association said the decision to strike had triggered “apprehension” among the public.
“Combine winter pressures with an already stretched NHS, alongside a series of extended strike action and it will nearly certainly result in a NHS crisis”.
Dr Bob Brown, South Tyneside NHS Foundation Trust’s Executive Director, Nursing and Patient Safety, said: “We are now preparing robust plans for the first of the announced strikes by junior doctors”.
National Voices, an umbrella organisation for 140 health and social care charities including the Alzheimer’s Society and Prostate Cancer UK, also opposed the strikes.
The General Medical Council (GMC) said the proposed strikes were “unprecedented” and warned about the impact on patients.
In July junior doctors in the British Medical Association voted to reject a new contract offered to them by the government. Out of nine posts at the next level down from me four doctors are missing and at the level below them, which should be staffed by three brand new doctors that started in August, only two even started.
That request has now been accepted by the BMA’s governing council.
He said: “I t is obviously a matter of great concern for everyone, especially for patients, and when so little time has been given for the NHS to make contingency plans”. This came about after six strikes. Porter would not say what the split in the vote was, but the BMA later said reports of a 16-14 result were inaccurate. “I urge junior doctors to call off this action”.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health said: “As doctors’ representatives, the BMA should be putting patients first not playing politics in a way that will be immensely damaging for vulnerable patients”.
“Forcing a contract on junior doctors in which they don’t have confidence, that they don’t feel is good for patients or themselves, is not something they can accept”, McCourt wrote in a letter to members earlier this year.
Speaking of which, recent NHS leaks show “workforce overload” is a major internal concern about Hunt’s promised “truly seven-day NHS” without extra funding or staff.
The BMA said it will call off the strikes if the Government agrees to stop the imposition.
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Junior doctors around the United Kingdom, including those at Newham University Hospital, will begin an all-out strike from 8am on Monday, September 12 to 5pm on Friday, September 16. The BMA said more details will follow.
