Resident doctors have been accused of being “very greedy” over their 29% pay demand, before talks with Wes Streeting on Thursday and a planned five-day strike next week.
The Guardian spoke to hospital trust bosses and senior medics, all of whom criticised the walkout in England and warned that it will cause “absolute chaos” in the NHS.
The 29% pay claim is causing serious divisions and resentment among lower-paid frontline NHS staff, hospital chiefs said.
“This is an unnecessarily greedy ask in a [resource-]constrained system, that deprives patients and other staff directly,” said one medical leader.
They pointed to the 22% salary increase for 2023-24 and 2024-25 that the health secretary gave resident doctors in England last year soon after Labour won power.
The medical leader added: “Other staff groups let resident doctors get a big rise last year on the understanding that from this year all NHS staff would receive roughly the same increases.
“But resident doctors tend to see themselves as the only people who work in healthcare and not as part of a health ecosystem. They don’t seem to realise the tensions they are creating with their workmates. Their demands are very greedy.”
Streeting will meet the co-chairs of the British Medical Association’s resident doctors committee on Thursday in Westminster in the hope of making enough progress to avert the strike. It declined his request to meet the full committee.
The BMA argues the 29% demand, spread over several years, is reasonable and affordable for the NHS. However, the minister has refused to reopen this year’s pay deal, which gave resident doctors a 5.4% rise, and called their 29% demand and looming stoppage “completely unreasonable”.
One hospital trust chief executive said: “Next week’s strike will cause absolute chaos. We’ve already got consultants stepping down to cover [resident doctors’] rotas. It’s a complete disaster.”
A second trust boss said: “I’m dismayed at the latest industrial action. I think the doctors have completely misjudged the mood of the country on this.”
A third hospital leader said the BMA was wrong to threaten strikes in pursuit of its policy of “full pay restoration” – getting the real-terms value of salaries back to 2008 levels.
They said: “The resident doctors have had the best pay settlement of any staff group and the concept of pay restoration has no support outside the BMA ranks. It’s not 2019. Asking for pay restoration when the economy is different comes across as naive.”
Several polls have found that public support for strikes has collapsed since resident doctors received their 22% rise last year. It has halved from 52% last year, when junior doctors staged 11 separate walkouts totalling 44 days under the Conservative government, to just 26% now, Ipsos found.
The third chief executive added: “There was broad support for the last set of strikes. There’s much less this time. The question is whether the BMA cares about public support. Their leaders and members are out of touch with public and NHS staff opinion. But they also hold a lot of cards.”
The Times reported that five patients died as a result of disruption caused by junior doctors’ strikes in 2023 and 2024, and the deaths were raised in prevention of future death reports issued by coroners to NHS bosses.
Among them was a 71-year-old woman whose death from sepsis was found to be the result of neglect and “more likely than not because of industrial action by junior doctors” and a 60-year-old man who died of multi-organ failure in late 2023. The coroner had written to NHS England warning that senior doctors were “unable to maintain a consistent overview of patients” due to the additional workload they were handling during the strikes.
Hospital chiefs warned that renewed industrial action would scupper the NHS’s efforts towards Keir Starmer’s pledge to restore the 18-week maximum wait for planned hospital treatment by 2029.
They said it would also undermine attempts to meet NHS England’s demand for a “financial reset” – cutting billions in overspending this year – by forcing hospitals to pay consultants to cover rota gaps.
Another senior doctor said: “An emerging bigger issue here is the greed of [resident] doctors hoovering up resources when other staff are much worse off. I think this tension will increase. All for one and none for all isn’t a principle we can move forward on.”
The BMA did not respond directly to the criticisms. A spokesperson said: “It is understandable that not everyone will be supportive of the proposed industrial action and people will voice opinion.
“But it is important to remember that strikes need not happen next week if the government can come forward with a plan to restore doctors’ pay and rebuild the value of our workforce.”