Junior doctors in England will consider walking out for 72 hours in March as health unions remain at loggerheads with the UK government over pay.
(Bloomberg) — Junior doctors in England will consider walking out for 72 hours in March as health unions remain at loggerheads with the UK government over pay.
The British Medical Association said it would call the three-day strike so long as its members vote to take action in a ballot that goes out on Jan. 9.
Newly-trained doctors want a pay increase above the 2% raise they are due this year.
Nurses and ambulance workers are already due to start a second round of strike action later this month, putting further pressure on a health service buckling from long waiting lists following the Covid pandemic. Hospital admissions for flu also soared to the highest level in a decade in the week before Christmas.
Read More: UK Nurses’ Union Urges Government to Meet ‘Halfway’ on Pay
“All our calls to meet, and letters to the health secretary and his immediate predecessors, have been ignored,” Vivek Trivedi and Robert Laurenson, co-chairs of the BMA junior doctors committee, said. “We are left with no choice but to act.”
The government has refrained from discussing pay with unions, arguing it is the job of independent pay review bodies. On Thursday it said it was willing to discuss the process for deciding 2023 pay levels with unions.
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