Junior doctors in England have started a four-day strike over pay, which is likely to cause the health service to break down in a way that has never happened before. Up to a quarter of a million meetings may have to be rescheduled.
Doctors set up picket lines outside hospitals at 7 a.m. on Tuesday, and they will stay there until 7 a.m. on Saturday. This is the longest stoppage of the wave of unrest, which began last year and has involved nurses, ambulance teams, and other health workers.
Tens of thousands of junior doctors, who are qualified doctors and make up almost half of the medical staff, are on strike to get pay raises that are more in line with inflation. This is the latest problem to hit the government-funded National Health Service. (NHS).
The group for doctors, the British Medical Association (BMA), wants a 35% pay raise. They say that their members’ pay has gone down by 26% in real terms over the past 15 years. The walkout on Tuesday came after doctors went on strike for three days last month.
“This next round of strikes will cause a level of chaos that has never been seen before,” NHS England National Medical Director Stephen Powis said. “We are very worried about how badly it could affect patients and services across the country.”
He said that this time there will be “considerably more” cancellations of operations and procedures than the 175,000 that had to be delayed during the last walkout. However, he said that the NHS was working to keep emergency services running.
Powis told BBC Radio, “We’ve also asked hospitals to reschedule procedures and outpatients as soon as possible, but this will take weeks to fix.”