Resident doctors picket Saint Thomas’ Hospital in central London on Friday at the start of a five-day walkout over pay. Photo by Andy Rain/EPA
Thousands of National Health Service resident doctors in England walked out Friday at the start of a five-day strike in a dispute with the government over pay.
The British Medical Association, the doctors’ union, said in a post on X that the strike could have been avoided if Health Secretary Wes Streeting had put forward a “credible offer” to address a one-fifth real-terms drop in their pay since 2008.
The 190,000-member union pointed to the inequity that after seven years of study and training, doctors in their first year as a fully qualified resident were paid more than $7 an hour less than a physician assistant in their first year.
“This is why resident doctors in England are taking a stand against the government — it’s time to pay us what we’re worth,” said the BMA, adding that it was seeking a raise of just $5.39 a hour to $30.45.
The union called on doctors to join picket lines outside designated large hospitals in London and seven other regions of England as the strike got underway at 7 a.m. local time, three days after negotiations with the government collapsed.
Streeting and Prime Minister Keir Starmer appealed to the doctors not to take industrial action due to the damage it would inflict on the NHS, which the Labour government had been working hard to rebuild since coming into office in summer 2024.
In a video posted on X, Streeting warned that striking doctors would make the working conditions of their colleagues who remained at their posts much more difficult, expressing “incredible frustration” over the action despite significant pay hikes over the past year.
“These strikes were unnecessary because resident doctors have already had a 28.9% pay increase since this government came to office. They’ve had the highest pay increase of the entire public sector two years in a row,” said Streeting.
He said the action was also unnecessary as he had been asking for the union to postpone for just three weeks to allow time to put together a package that would have made “a real difference to resident doctors’ working lives” by addressing training costs and other associated costs, as well as career progression issues.
Streeting vowed the impact on patients would be kept to a minimum, with NHS leaders ordering hospitals not to cancel non-emergency appointments and surgeries, with senior doctors stepping in to cover for their striking colleagues.
“Resident doctors should break ranks with the BMA leadership. The industrial action that starts on Friday is in no one’s interests and medics should not follow their union down its dangerous and destructive route, Starmer wrote in The Times.
The NHS leaders’ organization, the NHS Confederation, laid blame for “the impact of strikes and the distress they will cause patients” squarely at the feet of the BMA.
However, the Conservative opposition’s shadow health secretary, Stuart Andrew, said it was the government’s fault and that it had put patients in danger.
“Labour’s capitulation to union demands has fuelled this chaos. The real tragedy is not just the political cowardice that invited this chaos but the disruption of care patients face. It’s a threat to lives,” he wrote on social media.
The industrial action, the 12th round of strikes, is part of a long-running dispute over pay dating back to 2023 with doctors in the early years of their careers claiming inflation over the past 17 years has eroded away their pay, leaving them 20% worse off.
Inheriting the dispute from the previous Conservative government in July 2024, Labour gave doctors an immediate 22% raise, followed by an average of 5.4% for this year.
NHS doctors’ base salary is relatively low to start but rapidly rises to more than $100,000 a year, and can go much higher.
“Resident doctors are not worth less than they were 17 years ago. Restoring pay remains the simplest and most effective route toward improving our working lives,” BMA resident doctor co-leaders Dr. Melissa Ryan and Dr. Ross Nieuwoudt told the BBC.
“Mr. Streeting had every opportunity to prevent this strike going ahead, but he chose not to take it.”
