Senior doctors in England set strike dates for next month as they challenged Health Secretary Steve Barclay to discuss their pay demands in a fresh round of talks.
Consultants are set to take industrial action on Sept. 19 and 20 to protest against years of pay that’s declined in real terms, according to a statement on Monday from the British Medical Association. That follows a two-day walkout in July, and is in addition to strikes planned for Aug. 24 and 25. Junior doctors with the same union also plan four days of strikes later this month.
The walkouts underscore the difficulty faced by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to draw a line under months of industrial unrest in the struggling National Health Service. The BMA is demanding pay deals that outstrip inflation to make up for more than a decade of real-terms cuts under Conservative austerity policies.
“It is now 133 days since the secretary of state last met with us – demonstrating the government’s complete disregard for the expertise and value of consultants, and the very future of the health service and its patients,” BMA Consultants Committee Chair Vishal Sharma said in the statement.
The new walkout will come at tricky time for Sunak, in the run-up to the Conservative Party’s annual conference. But calls for fresh negotiations may fall on deaf ears after the prime minister said last month that there would be “no more talks” on pay after signing off on deals across a range of public sector workers that saw doctors awarded a sub-inflation increase of 6%. Inflation is currently just under 8%.
The ongoing industrial action is piling pressure on the NHS, and delayed appointments since the wave of labor unrest began last year with nurses striking are now expected to top 1 million based on Bloomberg calculations. That in turn is putting at risk one of Sunak’s five core promises to voters: to get waiting lists down in the health service.
