UK junior doctors prepare to strike over wages and burnout

Farooq Suleiman, Natalie Thomas and Hannah McKay

LONDON (Reuters) – Tired of a government that he says doesn’t care, Poh Wan plans to strike next week along with tens of thousands of other British junior doctors, saying he is overworked, underpaid and saddled with a student loan he can’t imagine the payoff.

The 28-year-old says he and his colleagues are on the brink of a precipice after a sub-inflation wage hike collided with a rising cost of living, leaving him wondering how he could pay off his over £85,000 ( $101,000) for tuition. duty.

On top of that, he remains outraged by his treatment during the pandemic, when he felt powerless to deal with the onslaught of patients entering the hospital with COVID-19 symptoms, saying that a public show of support doesn’t pay the bills.

He joins junior doctors across England who will go on a three-day strike on March 13 to protest wages and burnout that is putting health service staff at risk of quitting the health service as it copes with record-breaking patient waiting lists.

“We’ve reached the boiling point where we’ve had enough,” said Wang, a board member of the British Medical Association (BMA), which represents doctors and medical students.

“The anger is palpable that we have been used, insulted and devalued to such an extent.”

The son of Chinese immigrants who ran a takeaway restaurant in Chester, in the north of England, Wang became a doctor because he enjoyed helping people. After studying for six years at a medical institute, five, two worked as a psychiatrist.

Junior doctors are qualified doctors, often with several years of experience, who work under the direction of senior doctors and represent a large part of the country’s medical community.

He is paid around £40,000 a year for his base 40 hours a week and works extra hours which can be around 48 hours a week. He rents a room in a shared flat in west London, which can cost around £1,000 a month.

The story goes on

“ABOVE AND BEYOND”

At the beginning of the pandemic, Wang worked as an emergency physician in south London, where he and his colleagues had to make difficult decisions and comfort those patients who could not be admitted to intensive care units because they were overcrowded.

“We did our best to do the best we could,” he said.

He said the fact that he is now struggling to survive financially, with food inflation hitting 17% in the UK, has made him and his colleagues increasingly bitter over the past few years.

“We hate the sound of applause and applause because it’s empty,” Wang said, referring to the UK’s Clap for Our Carers campaign for healthcare workers at the height of the pandemic.

“If you value us and what we have been through and in terms of the sacrifices we have made, then pay us properly.”

The BMA reports that wages for junior physicians have fallen by more than a quarter over the past 15 years, using the Retail Price Inflation Index (RPI).

It says its members voted overwhelmingly in favor of the strike.

Strikes by junior doctors will put more pressure on the state-funded National Health Service (NHS), which is facing waves of strikes by nurses, emergency workers and other personnel.

Daniel Zahedi, 27, is another junior doctor who plans to go on strike on Monday. He describes his hospital in Cambridge, east of England, as chronically understaffed and struggling.

“We are often missing,” Zahedi said.

As a first-year doctor after completing his medical degree, Zahedi said he receives around £29,000 a year in base pay for a minimum of 40 hours a week. He said he worked about 60 hours this week, which is slightly above average but “not out of the ordinary.” His student loan debt is around £100,000.

“It’s not just $100,000 as a student, you have to pay for membership at King’s College, you pay for taking exams and even for career advancement,” he said.

Zahedi said that under the current circumstances, he does not see himself in the profession in the long term, despite his love of work.

“People are burning out left, right and center — where salaries go down year after year, where conditions get worse, where patient care gets worse,” he said.

“They feel unappreciated and people leave.”

In January, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak outlined the need to reduce waiting times in hospitals as one of his government’s five priorities.

Fighting strikes in several sectors, including train drivers and teachers, the government said capping public sector wages was necessary to bring double-digit inflation under control.

($1 = £0.8389)

(Written by Farouk Suleiman, edited by Kate Holton and Janet Lawrence)

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