Ambulance workers were to strike yesterday as junior doctors announced their first walkouts for next month across the British National Health Service (NHS).
The GMB labor group was to stage a walkout by ambulance staff throughout England, while members of the Unite union were to join the protest in the west Midlands and the north of the country.
Junior doctors represented by the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association (HCSA) on Sunday announced that they would strike for the first time in their history on March 15.
The British Medical Association (BMA), which represents 45,000 junior doctors, was set to announce strike dates as soon as yesterday, when the results of a ballot were to be released.
Emergency workers in Wales are also on strike after last week rejecting a 5.5 percent pay increase with a 1.5 percent bonus.
Strikes across the NHS are showing no signs of abating with nurses announcing wider and longer strikes to come at the start of next month.
The government has said it would not negotiate beyond the raises recommended by pay review bodies last year, which fall short of the UK’s rate of inflation.
“It’s time the prime minister ditched his ‘do nothing’ strategy for dealing with escalating strikes across the NHS,” Unison general secretary Christina McAnea said in a statement last week.
She said that workers throughout Britain should get raises as high as those offered by Scotland’s devolved administration.
Unison on Friday said that thousands more ambulance workers voted to strike, as well as staff in other areas of the NHS such as its blood and transplant division.
The vote from the BMA was due to a dispute over pay with staff seeking a raise above the 2 percent they are receiving for the current year. The ballot by the HCSA, a smaller union, saw 97 percent of its junior doctors vote in favor of industrial action, on a 75 percent turnout.
Philip Banfield, the BMA’s most senior doctor, told a young doctors’ conference on Sunday that British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and British Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Steve Barclay are on the precipice of a “historic mistake” in refusing to enter meaningful negotiations.
“This government, with its silence and disregard for our highly skilled and expert workforce, is consciously and deliberately overseeing the demise of the NHS at a point when it is needed most,” Banfield said.
Junior doctors have been subjected to a decade of real-terms pay cuts amounting to more than 26 percent, HCSA president Naru Narayanan said in a statement.
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