Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Strikes by doctors in England will go ahead this week after they rejected a last-ditch offer from health secretary Wes Streeting to avert a walkout in the run-up to Christmas.
Resident doctors — formerly known as junior doctors — will strike for five days from 7am on December 17 in a bitter escalation of a dispute over pay and jobs, the British Medical Association said on Monday.
Jack Fletcher, chair of the BMA’s resident doctors’ committee, said the union’s members had considered Streeting’s offer, which included legislation to give UK-trained junior doctors priority access to speciality training posts over international medical graduates.
But their “resounding response [in a vote] should leave the health secretary in no doubt about how badly he has just fumbled his opportunity to end industrial action”, he added.
Some 83 per cent of resident doctors voted to go ahead with the stoppage, compared with 17 per cent who backed shelving it, according to the BMA. Turnout was 65 per cent.
Health leaders have warned of the impact of strike action as the NHS grapples with one of its worst flu seasons on record, as well a surge in demand for ambulances and accident and emergency treatment.
Streeting hit out at the “self-indulgent, irresponsible and dangerous” strikes and said the government’s offer “would have halved competition for jobs and put more money in resident doctors’ pockets”.
“I am appealing to ordinary resident doctors to go to work this week. There is a different magnitude of risk in striking at this moment,” he added.
This is a developing story