It's their tenth walk out since March last year - Junior Doctors up and down the country have been on strike since Wednesday 3rd January in their dispute to achieve full pay restoration. I'm here today in Birmingham to find out whether people here support the strike action.
Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:00 Sure, so do I support the junior doctor strike? I think I do. I don't think there's really a choice.
00:07 I think doctors are so undervalued in this country. You sort of get what you pay for when it comes to medical service.
00:15 I just feel like compared to other professions, doctors just aren't paid enough.
00:19 Yeah, of course. Why wouldn't I support the strikes? Doctors do a real lot for this country really.
00:26 Obviously they deserve to be paid a bit more money than they're already on.
00:30 So yeah, definitely deserve to be paid more money. So strikes, yeah.
00:35 Not massively, no. I think they are unrealistic in their expectations.
00:47 I hear what they're saying about effectively not having had a pay rise or paid these since 2008.
00:56 But everything in the private sector has as well. I earn less than 30.
01:01 The amount of my wages have gone down in real terms is more than 35%.
01:05 How am I supposed to pay for it? I have to increase taxes so they can have a pay rise.
01:09 I do support them to an extent, but I think in the past those jobs used to be a vocation more so than a job.
01:19 And it just seems people are suffering.
01:23 Having previously worked in the NHS, I do actually support the junior doctors' strikes.
01:28 I feel like what they're going through at the moment, especially post-COVID and even before COVID,
01:33 they were very highly overworked, underpaid.
01:36 I've seen the stresses that the doctors have gone through working in both theatres and accident emergency units.
01:42 And I can see that they're struggling and they don't have enough physical hours in the day to get the work that they want doing.
01:48 And being paid pennies for it, I think, isn't quite the injustice for what they're actually doing and saving people's lives.
01:54 OK, I think, look, the reality is the junior doctors are a vital part of the NHS.
02:01 I think the NHS is probably, if not the best organisation which provides health care for all the sick and the people who actually need the service itself.
02:13 In terms of the strike, I get the frustration.
02:16 I think a lot of people are in the same place at the moment where inflation has actually bitten into real-time wages.
02:23 But I think there needs to be a bit of context to that as well.
02:26 Inflation has affected everyone across the country, across the world.
02:31 So it's not a unique problem that the UK is facing.
02:34 I think once the economy jump starts, I think everybody rightly should get a pay increase.
02:42 I think that I understand it from the junior doctors' perspective.
02:47 I also understand it from the government's perspective.
02:49 Ultimately, they are the custodians of the finances of the country.
02:52 So there needs to be a balanced approach.
02:55 So I think everybody needs to get around a table and try and see what the best solution forward is for that.
03:01 about.
03:03 [BLANK_AUDIO]