LONDON (AP) — Thousands of doctors walked off their jobs in Britain on Wednesday. This was the start of a six-day strike that would become the longest in the history of the state-funded National Health Service.
Managers said tens of thousands of scheduled appointments and operations for junior doctors in the early years of their careers will be canceled during the strike across England and Wales. The doctors who form the backbone of hospital and clinic care do not want to work until 7 a.m. on Tuesday.
Senior doctors and other paramedics had to be called in for emergency services, intensive care and maternity services.
Julian Hartley, chief executive of health managers' organization NHS Providers, said the strike came at one of the most difficult times of the year for the health service, “just after the Christmas and New Year period due to the pressures that the demands brought.” Of course we have flu , we have COVID.
“So there will be a significant impact on patients,” he said.
Britain has seen a year of sustained strikes across the healthcare sector as staff demanded pay rises to offset rising living costs.
The work stoppages strained an already overburdened health care system that is still struggling to recover from backlogs caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Nurses, ambulance crews and senior doctors have reached salary agreements with the government, but the union representing junior doctors has held out and negotiations have stalled. The government says it will not hold further talks unless doctors call off the strike, while the union says it will not negotiate unless it receives a “credible” wage offer.
“The idea that we absolutely want to call strikes and only call strikes is not what we want,” Dr. Vivek Trivedi, Co-Chair of the British Medical Association Junior Doctors Committee. “We want to negotiate an offer that we can make to our members and that our members will accept.”