Resident doctors on the picket line in London (Pic: Guy Smallman)
This week’s resident doctors’ strike is a fight for everyone who works in or uses the health service.
Everyone should get behind the strikers—and defy the attacks from Keir Starmer and the filthy right wing press.
The Daily Mail last week was among many that lambasted doctors as “greedy” and eager to harm their patients.
Health secretary Wes Streeting joined in, choosing the right wing Daily Telegraph to say the doctors’ BMA union was “trying to slam on the brakes” on his plans for reform. The truth is that under Labour, the NHS has continued to haemorrhage highly skilled health workers.
This includes a growing chunk of the 80,000 residents who are the bulk of doctors in the NHS.
Doctors leave because they are forced to work in hospitals that are collapsing and GP surgeries with queues out the door. Every day they see the toll of stress on their colleagues.
On top of that, there are now so few training places—which allow residents to specialise—that this year some 50,000 doctors will compete for fewer than 13,000 places. That failure is a key reason why millions of patients are waiting in pain and distress for treatment or surgery.
There are simply too few specialist doctors and allied staff.
Dr Andrew Meyerson this week pleaded with the government after finishing a long A&E shift in an east London hospital. “I’m exhausted and I want to go home,” he said. “But I need to send a message to our politicians.
“The BMA is demanding more doctors, and I support that demand—and so do the British public because everybody who can’t find a GP, who waits for 12 hours in A&E, who can’t get cancer care, knows the reason is we don’t have enough doctors and we don’t have enough nurses.”
The government must “wake up” and “provide funding for those training places”, he continued.
But instead, the department of health did the exact opposite and withdrew its offer of an additional 1,000 places after the strikes were announced. That’s a move that will undoubtedly hit patient care.
On the BMA’s latest six-day walkout, which started on Tuesday, striking doctors spoke to Socialist Worker.
Resident doctor Sarah Zbeidy said, “We want training posts so we can train more specialists—more cardiologists, psychiatrists, surgeons. These are the people who will look after us in the future.
“We are training a very small number of doctors. It’s not enough to care for all the patients. They are waiting years for their surgeries and their assessments.
“The quality of care has been eroded. It’s a scary time,” she told Socialist Worker.
She added, “The NHS is supposed to be for every single patient and we want to deliver the best care.
“But you can’t do it if you are overwhelmed, you are stretched. Where do you get the time and the energy?
“Most of our graduates have £100,000 in student debt. It’s very hard to encourage people to join medicine. It’s unsustainable.”
Aadam Aziz, also a striking resident doctor, told Socialist Worker that Streeting’s withdrawal of 1,000 training places was “disappointing”.
He explained it will have a “huge impact, not just for resident doctors but also for patients”.
He said, “People are waiting months and years for surgery and there are doctors who will be unemployed from August, it makes no sense. I don’t think the solution is holding back more doctors from becoming specialists.”
And as doctors leave Britain in droves, Labour has offered residents a paltry 3.5 percent rise.
This month it imposed an equally insulting 3.3 percent on nurses, paramedics and everyone else on the NHS Agenda For Change contract.
That move will only add to the number of unfilled health service vacancies.
Sarah explained that the BMA is demanding full pay restoration.
She told Socialist Worker, “We don’t want a pay rise. We are simply asking for our pay to be restored to what it used to be in 2008.”
“I think these are very just demands. It’s in the best interests of everyone to engage with us.
“We are very disappointed that the negotiations broke down. We don’t want to be on the picket line. But we are going to continue doing so until our demands are met because they are just.”
The leaders of some health unions have their own reasons for anger at the doctors’ strike.
One “senior union figure” told the Guardian newspaper last week that the BMA’s walkout against a 3.5 percent pay offer was making them look bad.
“The deals we have been able to present to our members are becoming a much tougher sell,” they said.
Another was particularly angry because resident doctors themselves were leading the BMA negotiations, rather than “professional negotiators”.
The first source added that having doctors lead the negotiations resulted in less willingness to do a deal on pay and conditions.
A third source claimed that there was “undoubtedly resentment” among unions representing NHS staff who were not doctors. They said there was a sense that the government always “seemed more willing to listen to the doctors.”
These candid admissions show why the big health unions have such a poor record on winning decent pay—they are always too ready to accept a shoddy deal and are rarely prepared to organise a national strike.
One London paramedic told Socialist Worker that she was “furious” at the unions’ attitude.
“The job of our leaders and negotiators is not to sell us whatever crap the department of health have offered up,” she said. “It’s to get us the best possible improvements in our pay and conditions.
“That means, instead of attacking the BMA for actually being ‘member-led’, we should be following them out the door.”
Years of poor pay deals, under both Labour and Tory governments, have caused the current NHS crisis—and the big health unions “pragmatism” paved the way for it.
“Look at the mess we’re in,” said the paramedic. “A&E is a disaster zone. People wait in pain for more than 12-hours to be seen, only then to be shunted to a corridor.
“Corridor care used to only happen at the busiest hospitals, and even then, only in winter. Now it’s happening everywhere, all year round.”
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