Five-day strikes by junior doctors in England are set to go ahead after the British Medical Association rejected calls to shorten them or call them off altogether.
The ruling council of the doctors’ union on Wednesday decided to continue backing the planned walkouts despite concern that it will cause serious disruption to hospitals and risk patient safety.
The BMA confirmed its continued backing for the three five-day stoppages scheduled to hit hospitals in England between next month and December. “Industrial action is still going ahead as planned in October, November and December”, said a union spokeswoman.
It debated but did not back calls by some council members to reduce the duration of the strikes, call them off altogether or to undertake a fresh ballot of England’s 54,000 medics below the level of consultant, who are opposed to the new contract the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, plans to impose on them from next month.
One council member said that the meeting had seen “a long, passionate, mature debate” about the strikes and what the BMA should do next in its campaign against the contract. Another BMA source said “a furious debate” had taken place.
The council backed a series of four five-day strikes by a vote of 16-11 when it last met in late August. The BMA last week called off the first walkout, which was due to be staged this week, and admitted it had given the NHS too little time to prepare for it. The Department of Health estimated that hospitals would have to rearrange about 100,000 non-urgent operations and around one million outpatient appointments because of the three walkouts.
Some BMA members fear that fewer junior doctors will support the planned stoppages than did during the eight days of strikes held between January and May, and also that they will lose public support.
The BMA’s renewed support for the stoppages comes despite fears voiced by medical bodies and NHS leaders that such long strikes would see junior doctors remove cover even from areas of emergency medical care. Bodies such as the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, which represents all the UK’s 250,000 doctors professionally, are worried that the walkouts will result in huge backlogs of operations and also damage the public’s trust in the medical profession.
Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, last week warned that the walkouts would produce “no good” and that hospitals could not cope with the loss of tens of thousands of junior doctors for such long periods. The strikes are due on 5, 6, 7, 10 and 11 October, 14-18 November and 5-9 December.
“We should be in no doubt that it will not be possible to ensure there will be no harm to patients, even with several weeks’ notice, if we are talking about multiple weeks of up to 50,000 doctors not being available for emergency care at hospitals across this country,” Stevens said at the NHS Expo in Manchester.
