Greedy greedy Junior doctors. We should’ve known there would be a problem.
I get it, they wanted a name change, resident instead of junior, but I think this signalled a change in the mindset of one of the most compassionate professions on Earth, being a doctor.
Junior doctors have announced another five-day strike from the 25th July, giving only two weeks notice.
The last time they did this, over 200,000 hospital appointments were cancelled and lives were undoubtedly put at risk.
Nana Akua slams the resident doctors as 'greedy, greedy, greedy' in a scathing assessment of their strike plans
GB News
I get it, they wanted a pay rise and I actually wasn’t opposed to giving them more the first time round.
But over the past two few years, junior doctors have seen two major pay hikes, the first one when Labour came to power of 22.3 per cent to end the strikes and since then then a further 5.4 per cent increase this year.
Higher than any other public sector worker, the army and police who can’t strike and teachers and nurses.
But they want this increased to 29 per cent to return them to what they call ‘real terms’ pay levels.
Even though they have calculated this real terms pay using the retail price index or RPI, which is rarely used because critics say it is inflationary which shows their pay has fallen by 21 per cent, as opposed to the CPI, consumer price index, which says their pay has fallen in real terms by a more realistic 4.7 per cent, which when compared to the rest of us, shows that junior doctors are fairing relatively well in.
And when you add their extremely generous pension into the mix, where the the state which is us taxpayers, contribute 27 percent compared to 3 per cent from a private employer, the lifetime earnings for doctors is pretty good.
There are about 77,000 junior doctors, only approximately 55 per cent of those eligible voted and around about half chose to strike, which means only a third of them voted for strike action.
Now let’s be clear, many junior doctors work incredibly hard and are brilliant. But others appear not to care about the welfare of their patients and indeed the state of the NHS.
I also note that it’s the younger doctors calling for this strike action which has received criticism from doctors themselves.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting said the BMA was leavening the ‘NHS recovery hanging by a thread’ he called it ‘completely unreasonable’.
He said: "No trade union in British history has seen its members receive a 28.9 per cent pay rise only to immediately respond with strikes, and the majority of BMA resident doctors didn’t vote to strike."
I say, bring in performance related pay. Reduce the pension contribution from the state and they are an essential service, remove their right to strike.