An NHS consultant has used the ITV vote to argue that proposed British Medical Association strike action over consultant pay is not in the best interests of doctors, patients or the wider public. The intervention comes as consultants are being asked to weigh a dispute after resident doctors have only just ended a three-year strike campaign.
British Medical Association pay dispute
The consultant, writing in the first person, said NHS consultants sit within some of the highest-earning groups in the country. He also said the BMA says average consultant pay is 26 per cent lower in real terms than it was 17 years ago, dating the comparison to 2009, in the wake of the financial crash.
That gap is the basis of the pay argument now moving through the BMA. By setting 2009 against today’s figure, the dispute is not just about a pay offer now on the table, but about whether the profession believes its long-term earnings have fallen enough to justify strike action.
Resident doctors and appointments
The consultant pointed to resident doctors’ recent decision to end their dispute after three years of strike action. He said that stoppage caused hundreds of thousands of appointments to be cancelled, giving a concrete measure of what repeated industrial action can do inside the NHS.
He also said NHS consultants have been squeezed by management, with managers micromanaging the job and undermining consultants’ sense of autonomy. In his account, that pressure sits alongside waiting times for outpatient appointments that remain a concern, difficult access to primary care and specialist services for many patients, bottlenecks affecting inpatient flow, and discharge delays that are frequently driven by limited social care provision.
NHS access and consistency
The same argument also draws on the wider shape of NHS care. The writer said the NHS provides near-universal access to state-of-the-art treatments through the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, and that clear guidelines and structured clinical pathways create a remarkable degree of consistency across the country.
That leaves the BMA with a harder question than a simple pay dispute. The organisation is driving proposed consultant strike action, but the consultant’s view is that the profession has to judge the proposal against patients’ access, the pressure on appointments and the recent cost of strike action already seen across the NHS.
What is not stated is how many consultants voted in favour of strike action or the final breakdown of the vote. That leaves the scale of support inside the profession as the next fact readers need before they can judge how much force the BMA can bring to bear.
