Junior doctors pledge to ratchet up strike action
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- Published: Thursday, 18 August 2016 07:45
- Written by News Editor
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Junior doctors have threatened the “trade union dispute of the century”. In a message to members, Dr Yannis Gourtsoyannis, a member of the BMA junior doctors committee detailed plans for repeated and crippling strikes, increasing pressure on NHS services as winter approaches. The BDA joined in the previous action and is keeping in touch with the BMA. Separately a CCG has abandoned plans to ration non-urgent treatments.
The junior doctors committee of the British Medical Association (BMA) is to ask its full council to back strikes in opposition to a controversial new contract for those below the level of consultant. Despite divisions within the union, no fresh ballot of members will be required if the council backs the plan.
The new contract for hospital doctors and dentists, which is due to be imposed this autumn, was rejected by the BMA last month after 58 per cent of members opposed it in a poll with a 68 per cent turnout. This followed six strikes – including the first full walkout by junior doctors in the history of the NHS. The industrial action was backed by 98 per cent of junior doctors in a ballot last autumn. The vote against the contract forced the resignation of Dr Johann Malawana, head of the union’s junior doctors committee, who had said it was a good deal.
In a message to members, Dr Yannis Gourtsoyannis, a member of the BMA junior doctors committee (JDC), detailed plans for repeated and crippling strikes, increasing pressure on NHS services as winter approaches. “It’s time to dust off our picket armbands,” he wrote. “An escalated fight is on. Theresa May will reap what her predecessors have sown.” He set out plans to ramp up the dispute to get “more and more” out of the Government, and to wage war on its policies. “The following two months are crucial for the Conservatives,” he wrote. “We are about to throw a massive spanner in their works.”
- Plans by the NHS to suspend all non-urgent surgery for four months have been withdrawn after a public outcry. The plans in Merseyside led to warnings from senior doctors that cases of cancer could be missed and patients left in pain, St Helens clinical commissioning group yesterday said it had decided to withdraw the proposal.
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