NHS England junior doctors have begun a three-day strike after talks between the British Medical Association (BMA) and government broke down earlier this month.
Dr Robert Laurenson, the co-chair of the BMA's junior doctor committee, said there were a lot of "actions of bad faith" from the government and "good will has been exhausted". Report by Alibhaiz. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
Dr Robert Laurenson, the co-chair of the BMA's junior doctor committee, said there were a lot of "actions of bad faith" from the government and "good will has been exhausted". Report by Alibhaiz. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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NewsTranscript
00:00 [crowd noise]
00:04 We've had 15 years of pay cuts.
00:06 We've had a contract imposed on us against our will.
00:10 There's a lot of bad faith actions from the government
00:13 and the government need to recognise that goodwill has been exhausted.
00:18 They imposed further pay cuts on us after everything that we did during Covid
00:22 and now it's time for the government to stand up and listen to us.
00:26 This is what happens when you treat a workforce exceptionally badly for over a decade.
00:32 That's an outright lie.
00:34 We didn't walk away.
00:35 We had an agreed deadline with the government
00:38 and the government failed to meet that deadline so we called strikes.
00:41 But we were always happy to continue talking and to continue negotiating
00:46 until we can get to a credible offer.
00:49 It's tough and it's difficult because you give up all of your time and energy
00:55 into this career and you do that because you care and you want to help people
00:59 and you want people to benefit from a service that's free at the point of access.
01:04 We 100% believe that and we didn't go into it for money
01:08 but it gets more and more difficult to justify working here in this country
01:15 when you see the alternatives and you're like,
01:17 "Oh, I can get more. I can have a better life.
01:20 I'm still doing medicine. I'm still helping people, just not in the UK."
01:23 It's tough, if I'm honest.
01:26 I love my work and it's something I get a lot of satisfaction from.
01:32 However, at the moment where I work, we're really struggling with gaps,
01:36 particularly at a consultant level.
01:39 The ward that I work on hasn't got a permanent consultant at the moment
01:43 and so we're getting by with consultants covering from other wards.
01:48 That puts a lot of pressure on me as the registrar and on my junior colleagues as well.