Britain’s biggest medical union has warned health secretary Steve Barclay that “the clock is ticking” to avert next week’s planned strike by NHS junior doctors, challenging him to make a “credible” pay offer to kick-start negotiations.
The gambit by the British Medical Association follows a claim by health leaders that the four-day action, which falls during Easter school holidays when staff ranks are already denuded, could threaten “basic patient safety”. Health trusts around the country are set to deploy consultants, nurses and other staff in an effort to maintain vital services.
Junior doctors represent about half of the medical workforce in England’s taxpayer-funded health system. The BMA argues their pay has been cut by more than a quarter in real terms since 2008.
The doctors have publicly called for a 35 per cent pay rise but in a letter to Barclay on Thursday they suggested that a “credible offer” could tempt them to the negotiating table and denied his assertion that they had made a commitment to that figure a precondition for entering talks.
Throwing down the gauntlet again to Barclay in a statement on Friday, the co-chairs of the BMA junior doctors committee, Dr Vivek Trivedi and Dr Rob Laurenson, said: “Even at this late stage we stand ready to consider any offer the minister tables — which, if credible, could mean the strike action being suspended — and we urge him to do so.”
Challenging the health secretary to put forward an offer “that truly demonstrates you are serious about addressing junior doctors losing more than 26 per cent of their pay in real terms”, they added: “The clock is ticking Mr Barclay. We are ready to get round the table, so make a credible offer to start negotiations and stop next week’s strikes.”
A three-day walkout by junior doctors last month resulted in the postponement of more than 175,000 appointments and procedures, underlining the strain the action is putting on the NHS as it seeks to clear a historically high backlog of more than 7mn patients waiting for non-urgent care.
The NHS Confederation, which represents health leaders across England, accepted that the chances of next week’s strikes being called off were now “slim” but urged the government and the BMA, as well as the smaller Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association, whose members are also striking, “to do everything they can to find common ground and negotiate constructively”.
One anonymous health leader cited by the NHS Confederation said “basic patient safety will be compromised”, with emergency departments particularly likely to be “utterly overwhelmed”.
Dr Layla McCay, the NHS Confederation’s director of policy, said health leaders were “bracing themselves for the most significant strikes in a decade with many aspects of patient care resting on a knife edge”.
The department of health and social care said the junior doctors’ strikes “will risk patient safety and cause further disruption and postponed treatments”.
It described the BMA’s 35 per cent pay demand as “unreasonable” and added: “We will also not negotiate in public — talks need to be private with both parties respecting the confidentiality of the process, as has been the case with other health unions.”