A salary increase of 29.2 percent: young doctors demand that in the United Kingdom. To reinforce that requirement, around 50,000 doctors laid their work on Friday morning at 7 a.m. The strike of the Resident Doctorsrecently graduated doctors who work in hospitals before they specialize, it is expected to take 7.00 am until Wednesday morning. The action is only held in England: young doctors in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are not participating.
Although the demanded increase seems absurdly high compared to, for example, the increase in salaries of doctors in Dutch hospitals, who will improve a total of 8 percent in the coming two years, an increase in this scale according to the British medical union BMA is desperately needed. Due to cuts and inflation, the real incomes of starting doctors in the UK have fallen by more than 20 percent since 2008, says the BMA. According to the trade union, that income trap is greater than in other professional groups.
According to the BMA, the fact that the salaries of these starting doctors after an earlier series of strikes have risen over the past two years, according to the BMA. The trade union states that this increase is also necessary to repair the income trap.
The British government thinks very differently about that. Wes Streeting, Minister of Health, has put an increase of 5.4 percent on the table for 2025-2026 and says that the budget does not offer him room to go up further, although he does want to negotiate the employment conditions of young doctors. That the BMA again takes action so shortly after the previous salary increase and again requires a significant increase, Streeting mentioned In an opinion article in The Guardian “Unreasonable and unprecedented”.
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‘A blow to the recovery’
The strike is poorly out of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. His Labor government came to power last year with the promise to tackle the major problems in health care. After a destructive report on the poor condition of the service and the long waiting lists, Starmer announced a ten -year plan. When presenting the budget in October last year, it was announced that the National Health Service could count on 22.6 billion pounds (27.1 billion euros) extra annually, much more than the sector itself expected.
To continue that positive trend – for example, 2,000 additional general practitioners were hired and the waiting lists in April and May – Starmer and his Minister of Health pulled everything out of the closet to stop the strike. Streeting wrote in his opinion piece that the strike “puts a huge burden” on the colleagues of the young doctors, and that they “put a blow to the recovery that we all see in our health care.” He also lashed out at the BMA: “No trade union in British history has ever experienced that its members received such a substantial wage increase and immediately responded to that with strikes.”
Starmer entered an opinion article on Thursday The British newspaper The Times rely on the sense of responsibility of the doctors. “Behind the headlines, patients are hiding whose life will be destroyed by this decision.” He calls on the doctors not to participate in the BMA strike. “Our NHS and your patients need you.”
That didn’t help. The trade union and the 50,000 young doctors stood firm. The chairman of the trade union, Tom Dolphin, told BBC Radio that he was disappointed in the ‘hard position’ that the Labor government takes.
This weekend it must show whether the strike leads to problems. In contrast to earlier work interruptions in which all non-essential operations were postponed, Streeting called to allow hospitals to continue on as many treatments as possible. The BMA called that decision risky, because the occupation would not be sufficient for that.
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