Junior Doctors are back on strike across Ipswich & Suffolk
The next stage of national strikes is underway
Junior Doctors across Ipswich & Suffolk are back on strike over better pay and working conditions.
BMA members are walking out for five days from 7.00am today, until 11:59pm on Wednesday (28th February), after further talks with the Government broke down.
Hospital bosses said they are learning from each strike on how to do things better.
Matt Keeling from West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust said:
"To anybody who might have had their appointment postponed, we're very sorry to them, we understand how difficult that must be and we are aiming to rebook appointments as soon as possible for anybody that might have been affected.
As an organisation we are very supportive of colleagues and their legal right to take industrial action - Equally, we are very supportive and we ensure that there is support in place for colleagues who are at work during that period as well."
Nick Hulme from East Suffolk & North Essex NHS Foundation Trust said:
"Our ambition was that we'd have nobody waiting over 78 weeks by the end of March this year and mainly due to the industrial action over the past 15 months, we will probably miss that target both nationally and locally, not by much. I'm pleased to say. But again, 78 weeks is far too long.
Across Ipswich and Colchester Hospital we will be cancelling about 800 outpatient appointments and about 300 operations, they will have to be slotted into the gaps that we've got - behind each one of those numbers is somebody's life...there is a real impact on people's lives that goes beyond just a health."
The BMA say they've made "every effort" to find a fair solution with number 10.
They say the Health Secretary declined the opportunity to extend the strike mandate, after failing to table an improved pay offer.
In announcing the industrial action, BMA junior doctors committee co-chairs Dr Robert Laurenson and Dr Vivek Trivedi said:
"We have made every effort to work with the Government in finding a fair solution to this dispute whilst trying to avoid strike action. Even yesterday we were willing to delay further strike action in exchange for a short extension of our current strike mandate. Had the Health Secretary agreed to this, an act of good faith on both sides, talks could have gone ahead without more strikes. Sadly, the Government declined.
“The glacial speed of progress with the Government is frustrating and incomprehensible. The Health Secretary was quite clear in media interviews during our last action that she would meet us ‘in twenty minutes’ when no strikes were planned. She also made clear that she had a further offer to make. It turned out to be more than twenty days before we were offered a meeting with a minister. When we did it wasn’t with the Health Secretary, and there was no offer on the table. Time has been lost that could have been used to negotiate with us, or at least with the Treasury and the Prime Minister for the mandate to make a credible offer.
“From the very start of the industrial action, we have been clear that there is no need for strike action as long as substantial progress is made, and we remain willing to carry on talking and to cancel the forthcoming strikes if significant progress is made and a credible offer is put forward.
“The Government’s actions are difficult to understand, especially when their own MPs are telling the Chancellor to pay junior doctors more fairly. Whatever the holdup, from whomever it is coming, it needs to end now. This will be the last action of our current mandate, but we are already balloting for six months more. Even now we are willing to put off these strikes to find a solution – it’s in the Health Secretary’s hands.