‘We feel discouraged’: striking young doctors exhausted but determined to fight on

“I“I’m excited to get back to work, to get back to work,” said Matthew Alexander, a junior radiology resident. “Nobody wants to be here, nobody wants to strike.” Alexander, 30, is one of about 50 junior doctors on the picket line Thursday morning Friarage Hospital in Northallertona bustling market town in Rishi Sunak’s vast North Yorkshire constituency.

It is a sunny day; there is cheerful and enthusiastic singing and a lot of support from drivers who honk, but it is very clear that only Betty, a relaxed 11-year-old jackapoo, is even remotely happy to be here.

“It’s hard,” said Sarah Peters, 26, a neurosurgery resident. “Explaining alone to family members is difficult and knowing that your colleagues will have a more difficult day at work because you are not there. I didn’t enter this profession for this reason; I got into it to help people, but we have no choice but to strike. It’s sad that it had to come to this.”

The five-day strike by junior doctors is the 11th action in their long-running wage dispute. People on the picket line say they are exhausted by their working conditions – and just as determined to keep fighting for improvements.

“We feel discouraged,” said Tom Sharp, a trainee GP in Leeds. “I think trainee doctors are fed up with poor wages and conditions and that’s why so many are leaving for places like New Zealand where the wages and conditions are so much better.”

He adds: “Unfortunately, that has a direct impact on patient care here. People will not get the NHS they deserve.”

Sharp knows people who have left the NHS and moved to other countries. “They will stay there, they will not return to the NHS,” he says. “I’ve thought about it too. I think it would be difficult to find a doctor who hasn’t thought about it.”

Those sentiments are echoed by Emma Runswick, a junior doctor in Greater Manchester and deputy chairman of the BMA council. She has friends who have gone to New Zealand and were recently back in Britain for a wedding.

“They said, ‘Look at the state of the NHS in this country, look how much better off we are in New Zealand.’ They are a couple and get paid 70% and 100% more than us (her and her partner) for the same hours. Why? Why would they want to come back? And they work in a service where they don’t have to constantly apologize for the delays we see here. They don’t have to apologize. They are fully staffed.”

Runswick understands that some people look at the 35% wage requirement set by junior doctors and think it is a lot. “It sounds ridiculous, but it only sounds ridiculous because we’ve lost so much. We are only asking for the wages we received in 2008.”

Runswick says the money the doctors are asking for is a “bargain” in the scheme of things “and not even close to what we could get paid elsewhere”.

It’s also a dispute over patient safety, say those on the picket line. Peters says burnout is “rampant” in the NHS, with medics permanently working in understaffed environments.

“The government has had so many opportunities to negotiate,” she says. “My understanding is that they have now spent more on the strikes than they would have needed to get us the wage deal we asked for. When they say there is no money, clearly there is.”

Some observers have wondered why a strike is necessary when the current government appears to be on its way. Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting has promised to start negotiations on his first day in office.

The Northallerton picket line is less than 10 minutes from Sunak’s country home in North Yorkshire. Runswick said: “We are dealing with the government we have at the moment which is led by Rishi Sunak. We’ve been asking for something credible from him for 20 months. If we don’t take action, our wages will continue to fall in real terms and our colleagues will continue to leave the country.”

She says the mix of emotions on the picket line is reflected more widely in the NHS. “There has been a lot of despair, but one thing the dispute has given doctors is that they can turn that despair into a little bit of anger, a little bit of hope. We are finally doing something about the deterioration of service.”