'Creating posts and improving patient care should not be dependent on calling off a strike.'
The British Medical Association has hit back at Keir Starmer’s call for the union to cancel next week’s strikes or risk losing the current deal.
Last week, the BMA rejected a 3.5% pay rise for this year, stating that it wasn’t enough to achieve pay restoration. The BMA then announced that resident doctors would go on strike after Easter.
The prime minister has now given the doctors’ union an ultimatum, demanding that they cancel the resident doctors’ strike action within 48 hours.
Starmer says that if the BMA doesn’t cancel the strikes, the government will withdraw the extra 1,000 speciality training posts it has promised.
The government pledged to create 4,000 extra training places over three years, including 1,000 places this year.
Writing in the Times, Starmer criticised the BMA’s decision to reject the deal, calling it “reckless”, and said that the union should allow members to vote on the deal.
The government says the 48-hour deadline is because the applications for these training posts, which start in the summer, would open in April so Thursday is the last day they can be added into the system.
The BMA has rejected the government’s ultimatum, saying that “these negotiations are not about arbitrary cut-offs”.
The chair of the BMA resident doctor committee, Dr Jack Fletcher, said: “NHS England has already confirmed that 1000 posts are going ahead which is absolutely the right thing to do for doctors and patients.”
He argued that “removing potential doctors’ posts at a time when corridor care and GP queues are already putting the NHS under pressure, is clearly bad for patients”.
Fletcher added: “Creating posts and improving patient care should not be dependent on calling off a strike.”
He went on to say that “these negotiations are not about arbitrary cut-offs as the Prime Minister seems to think. Any ‘deadline’ disappears the moment there is a credible and sustainable offer on the table.”
Fletcher said that the BMA is seeking to talk with the government again later today, “with every intention of achieving a meaningful outcome that could see the strikes called off and a pay deal we can support”.
He also claimed that resident doctors had been pushed into strike action as 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”.
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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