Resident Doctors

Six-day stoppage in England next week to go ahead and minister confirms offer of extra training places withdrawnThe NHS is bracing for the longest strike yet by resident doctors after last-ditch talks failed, prompting Wes Streeting to accuse the medics of suffering from “delusion”.Many thousands of resident – formerly junior – doctors across England will stage a six-day stoppage over pay and jobs starting at 7am on Tuesday, just after the Easter weekend. A deadline for agreement ended on Thursday. Continue reading...

British Medical Association leaders say PM’s threat to axe posts makes strike action more likelyResident doctors have accused Keir Starmer of damaging the prospects of a deal to end their pay and jobs dispute by threatening to axe 1,000 new jobs for medics in the NHS.The claim from the British Medical Association leaders came just before the Thursday deadline given by the prime minister for the union to accept the government’s final offer. Continue reading...

Prime minister threatens to withdraw NHS training posts for residents doctors if they don’t call off strikeGood morning. Keir Starmer is chairing a meeting of the government’s Cobra emergency committee later to discuss the Iran war, but domestic issues don’t go away and he (or, to be more accurate, his staff) have also found time to write an article for the Times delivering a warning to resident doctors in England planning to go on strike. As Jamie Grierson reports, the PM is threatening to withdraw an offer of thousands of extra NHS training posts for resident doctors if they do not call off the strike within 48 hours.Judging by what Dr Jack Fletcher, chair of the BMA resident doctors committee, told the Today programme in an interview this morning, Starmer may have as little success with his ultimatum as Donald Trump seems to be having with his inconsistent and increasingly apocalyptic warnings to what is left of the Iranian government.I’m very happy to sit down with the government at any point to try and negotiate a settlement, but I don’t think that’s done by writing in newspapers and issuing threats unilaterally.The government made very late changes to the pay offer, reducing the pay investment and stretching it over a longer period in a way that had not been previously talked about.Ministers effectively moved the goalposts on the deal at the last minute.Two weeks ago, the government took that investment, reduced it, and then stretched it over three years. That is a very, very, very different outcome to the one that we were discussing just two weeks ago. Continue reading...