A revolt by rank-and-file junior doctors forced the British Medical Association to call off a five-day strike scheduled for next week on Monday, amid worries about the impact it would have on patients and the health service.
BMA insiders say members of the junior doctors committee, who had called the strike last Wednesday, were inundated with “scores, possibly hundreds” of angry protests in the days afterwards, forcing the rethink.
Junior doctors were particularly annoyed and anxious that the BMA had given the NHS just 12 days to prepare for the first of what the doctors’ union later said would be a series of week-long stoppages.
Trainee medics dismayed at the BMA’s decision were worried that the action – which has been due to be the latest protest against health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s new contract for junior doctors – would leave hospitals too little time to arrange to cover gaps in rotas and could compromise patients’ safety, and damage public trust.
Throughout Friday and the weekend, Dr Ellen McCourt, the chair of the junior doctors committee, received a regular stream of emails to her BMA email address from colleagues uneasy at the decision, as did other members of the committee. They demanded an urgent rethink of the union’s position. That played a crucial role in the BMA’s surprise announcement on Monday that it was abandoning its plan to strike next week, even though they had won no fresh concessions from the health secretary.
McCourt said on Monday that the BMA had called off next week’s strikes to protect patient safety because “for the first time in this dispute, NHS England have told us that a service under such pressure cannot cope with the [12-day] notice period for industrial action given. We have to listen to our colleagues when they tell us that they need more time to keep patients safe.”
The committee’s decision to stage week-long total withdrawals of junior doctor labour across the NHS in England each month until December had prompted such anger that McCourt even received death threats over what some saw as a reckless and indefensible course of action. However, she has not indicated whether those threats came from fellow junior doctors or members of the public.
McCourt revealed in a message she posted on a junior doctors’ Facebook message site on Sunday: “My 64-year-old retired mother has had the press camped outside her house. JDC members’ lives have been splashed across the papers. And I have received threats to my life.” That followed several days of hostile coverage in several newspapers of the planned strikes and of BMA leaders who had endorsed them.
The rolling series of week-long walkouts had been condemned by leading medical bodies such as the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges and the General Medical Council, as well as by some hospital consultants, as disproportionate and risky.
However, Hunt made clear late on Monday that the BMA’s decision to call off next week’s action, while welcome, would not persuade him to lift his threat to impose a new contract on all 54,000 medics working in the NHS in England below the level of consultant from next month. His refusal to accede to the BMA’s plea leaves it unclear as to what the union will now do. Its planned strikes in October, November and December will still go ahead unless he relents, McCourt maintained.
In a statement on Monday in the House of Commons on the long-running dispute, Hunt – whom Theresa May last week praised as “an excellent health secretary” despite unease in the NHS about his handling of the junior doctors row – said: “This afternoon’s news delaying the first strike is of course welcome. But we must not let it obscure the fact that the remaining planned industrial action is unprecedented in length and severity and will be damaging for patients, some of whom will already have had operations cancelled”.
About 100,000 planned operations will be postponed, and around a million outpatient appointments rescheduled as a result of the BMA’s actions, he said. “We cannot give an absolute guarantee that patients will be safe. But hospitals up and down the country will bust a gut to look after their patients in this unprecedented situation and communicate with people whose care is likely to be affected as soon as possible,” he told MPs.
Despite the BMA’s olive branch, relations between it and the Department of Health grew even more strained when the DH circulated a briefing paper contesting many of McCourt’s claims in her statement announcing that next week’s strike was off, six of which it said were categorically untrue. They also sought to embarrass McCourt, an A&E trainee in Hull, by contrasting her opposition to the contract now with her endorsement of it in a BBC Radio 4 interview on 18 May, the day the BMA and DH announced that a deal had been agreed.
For example, the DH denied her claim that the contract is discriminatory on equality grounds. In May, she told the PM programme that “we’ve come away with an offer, with a contract, that emphasises that all doctors are equal, that has put together a really good package of things for equalities so that we are minimising the issues we had with the previous offer with regards to gender and equality.”
BMA calls off September junior doctors" strike after "scores" of protests
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