Junior doctors in England begin longest strike in NHS history

Junior doctors in the National Health Service, or NHS, in England walked out on Wednesday at the start of six days of industrial action, the longest such strike in the organization's 75-year history.

The industrial action will be the 10th taken by junior doctors, who make up nearly half of all doctors in the NHS in England, since last March, as part of a long-running dispute over pay, with the previous days of action estimated to have led to around 1 million outpatient appointments and operations having to be rearranged.

Stephen Powis, NHS England's national medical director, said this was likely to be the most hard-hitting industrial action so far because of its length, and also the time of year, when the service is particularly busy.

"January could be one of the most difficult starts to the year the NHS has ever faced," he said in a statement. "The action will not only have an enormous impact on planned care, but comes on top of a host of seasonal pressures such as COVID, flu, and staff absences due to sickness — all of which is impacting on how patients flow through hospitals."

Strike action had been put on hold in October to allow pay talks to take place between the government and doctors' representative body the British Medical Association, or BMA, but in December the deadline passed without any resolution having been reached.

Junior doctors received a pay rise of around 9 percent last April, and an additional 3 percent from this month onwards was discussed. The BMA wants a larger rise, saying that pay rises since 2008 have been below inflation, but widespread reports that it wanted an increase of 35 percent have been rejected by the Full Fact fact-checking website.

BMA junior doctors committee co-chairmen Robert Laurenson and Vivek Trivedi told the BBC the government needed to come forward with a "credible offer… doctors would have liked to start the new year with the hope of an offer on pay that would lead to a better-staffed health service and a better-valued profession".

For the government, Health Secretary Victoria Atkins has called on junior doctors to stop their action and "come back to the negotiating table so we can find a fair and reasonable solution to end the strikes once and for all".

Before Christmas, she was accused of using deliberately belittling language in a television interview in which she referred to "junior doctors, or doctors in training as I prefer to call them".

The term junior doctor is used to describe anyone gaining experience on their way to becoming a general practitioner, and can be applied to someone with up to nine years of experience. All junior doctors have completed medical degrees and are qualified.