Resident doctors have now staged 15 rounds of strike action since 2023 as the dispute continues

DOCTORS from the Whittington Hospital have claimed the government is “black­mailing” them as they enter another round of strikes to campaign for more jobs and better pay.

Resident doctors across the country began a six-day strike on Monday, the 15th course of strike action since 2023.

The British Medical Association (BMA) says there is a big shortage of NHS “training positions” – jobs where doctors specialise after completing their two foundation years. Over 50,000 doctors applied for just 13,000 of these roles last year, creating a “bottleneck” situation.

As part of their negotiations with the BMA, the government offered to create up to 4,500 training positions for resident doctors, which they have since revoked after the BMA announced the strikes, angering doctors.

The union is also calling for “pay restoration” for doctors, asking for a wage increase to match high levels of inflation, arguing that since 2008 their wages have fallen by over 20 per cent in real terms.

A resident doctor GP trainee at the Whittington, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Tribune that government and media attention was placing far more focus on pay demands, and that the “exponentially” increasing job shortage was going underreported.

He said: “Of course, pay is still an issue for a lot of doctors. But every time a new cohort of foundation doctors qualify, there are more people competing for the same limited jobs, so this is a problem that is exponentially rising, and that’s a massive reason for the strikes.

“The reduction of the job offers is the weirdest thing that’s happened in the three years that I’ve been striking. It’s made a lot of us upset and angry because it’s the first time that any government has used an almost blackmail-style of tactic.

“Even the Conservative government never threatened to take something away that they’d previously offered to doctors, and so I think it’s a weird thing to do when the country clearly needs more doctors.

“I think right now a lot of us are feeling a lack of respect from the government. The work we are doing, especially since Covid, is unbelievably difficult and so many doctors are suffering from burnout due to staff shortages – we’re overworked. So for [health secretary] Wes Streeting to call us ‘moaning minnies’, like he did in the previous round of strikes, shows how the language and the framing around doctors has shifted since the pandemic.”

Speaking to the BBC, Mr Streeting said that the doctors’ strikes would cause “huge disruption”  to NHS services and said that doctors were “by a country mile” the best paid public sector workers. He added that they were “torpedoing” their chances of achieving more training positions and a pay increase by going on strike.

A spokesperson for the Whittington Hospital said: “As of late Thursday we had minimal cancellations and the vast majority of services were due to operate as normal. If there are any cancella­tions we will contact affected patients but unless they hear from us, patients should attend as normal.”

Jack Fletcher, chair of the BMA Resident Doctors Committee, said: “These strikes were entirely avoidable. We offered the government several opportunities to undo their last-minute goalpost shift, and they refused.

“What is even harder to understand is the government scrapping the promised 1,000 training posts. One thousand places, gone, overnight, one thousand opportunities for doctors who have studied hard, dedicated their lives to the NHS, destroyed. It’s this government that is holding patients hostage and using our next generation of consultants and surgeons as bargaining chips.”