LONDON, Sep 17 : Junior doctors, qualified medical graduates undergoing their specialist training in National Health Service (NHS) hospitals, will be known as “resident doctors” as part of an agreement with the government that marked an end to months of industrial action over pay on Tuesday.
The British Medical Association (BMA) Junior Doctors Committee, co-chaired by Indian-origin medic Vivek Trivedi, will now be known as the Resident Doctors Committee as it accepted the British government’s pay offer.
Junior doctors had been in dispute over what they said was a decade of real terms pay cuts since October 2022, during which time they have taken 44 days of strike action.
“Outside the pay negotiations, the government has agreed that from September 18 ‘junior doctors’ across the UK will be known as ‘resident doctors’ to better reflect their expertise,” reads a BMA statement.
It follows a motion to the BMA’s annual policy-making conference last year when doctors voted in favour of such a name change.
“This move has been a long time coming and after much hard work, a cohort of doctors who make up nearly 25 per cent of all doctors in the UK will now have a title that better reflects the huge range of skills and responsibilities they have,” the BMA added.
Meanwhile, as part of the deal agreed between these doctors and the government, the pay uplift across two years of the dispute will be 22.3 per cent on average. The rest of the uplift comes from the recommended pay award for 2024-25 announced in July, which gave junior/resident doctors an average 8 per cent increase across grades.
“It should never have taken so long to get here, but we have shown what can be accomplished with our determination and with a government willing to simply sit down and talk realistically about a path to pay restoration. One strike was one strike too many,” said Dr Trivedi in a joint statement with co-chair Dr Robert Laurenson.
“This deal marks the end of 15 years of pay erosion with the beginning of two years of modest above inflation pay rises. There is still a long way to go, with doctors remaining 20.8 per cent in real terms behind where we were in 2008… The Resident Doctors Committee, as we will be called, will be using the next months to prepare to build on their success so that future cohorts of doctors never again need to see the kind of pay cuts we have,” they said.
Around 45,830 junior/resident doctors in England took part in an online referendum over the past month, with around 66 per cent voting in favour of the offer.
“I am pleased that our offer has been accepted, ending the strikes ahead of looming winter pressures on the NHS,” said Wes Streeting, appointed Health Secretary following Labour’s general election win in July.
“We inherited a broken NHS, the most devastating dispute in the health service’s history, and negotiations hadn’t taken place with the previous ministers since March. Things should never have been allowed to get this bad. That’s why I made ending the strikes a priority, and we negotiated an end to them in just three weeks,” he said.
According to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), the cumulative impact of the uplifts mean a doctor starting foundation training in the state-funded NHS will see their basic pay increase to GBP 36,600, compared to around GBP 32,400 before the deal. (PTI)
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