Junior doctors in England to strike for 72 hours from 13 March

Junior doctors in England will take strike action for three days next month in a 72 hour walkout from Monday 13 March, the BMA has announced.

The union’s representatives said that the health and social care secretary for England, Steve Barclay, had left them with no choice but to act after the government failed to meaningfully engage with them on pay.

Representatives of the BMA’s Junior Doctors Committee held a meeting with the government to discuss the ongoing dispute over pay on Wednesday 22 February. But the BMA reported that only civil servants were in attendance, with Barclay choosing not to attend, and that no pay offer was put on the table.

The junior doctors are calling for “pay restoration,” meaning the reversal of their estimated 26% real terms cut in pay since 2008-09. The BMA said this would require a 35.3% pay rise, costing the government around £1.65bn this financial year.1

“The Department of Health and Social Care made it clear they are not ready to enter negotiations,” the co-chairs of the Junior Doctors Committee, Rob Laurenson and Vivek Trivedi, said in a statement. “Every day that passes without the government beginning negotiations with us is a day that more exhausted doctors might leave the NHS, more patients don’t get the quality of care they need, and the crisis in the NHS deepens even more.”

The BMA’s ballot on industrial action saw 98% of junior doctors vote to back strike action, with a turnout in excess of 77%. The union said that this was the largest ever turnout it had seen for a ballot.2 Junior doctors in Scotland will also be balloted on industrial action from 29 March.

“Make no mistake, this strike was absolutely in the government’s gift to avert. They know it, we know it, and our patients also need to know it. We have tried, since last summer, to get each health secretary we have had round the negotiating table,” Laurenson and Trivedi said. “How in all conscience can the health secretary continue to put his head in the sand and hope that, by not meeting with us, this crisis of his government’s making will somehow just disappear?”

In response Barclay said, “As part of a multiyear deal we agreed with the BMA, junior doctors’ pay has increased by a cumulative 8.2% since 2019-20. We also introduced a higher pay band for the most experienced staff and increased rates for night shifts.

“I’ve met with the BMA and other medical unions to discuss what is fair and affordable, as well as wider concerns around conditions and workload. I’ve written to the BMA to arrange a meeting and want to continue discussing how we can make the NHS a better place to work for all.”

Junior doctors last went on strike in 2016, in protest against contractual changes imposed by the government. In what was the first time they had gone on strike in 40 years, the doctors carried out four 24-48 hour strikes in the first four months of that year.

In 2019 the dispute finally ended, with junior doctors and final year medical students voting to accept a deal that included a four year incremental 8.2% pay rise.3 However, the deal also included room for a review at a later date should the situation change. As a result, former Junior Doctors Committee chair Sarah Hallett told The BMJ that she began raising the issue of pay with “increasing urgency” from 2020 but that the government refused to “meaningfully engage.”4