To think the BMA have misjudged with another doctor's strike?

[Locutus2000]

Last year they got more than anyone else in the NHS along with an improved deal. Nurses and other AHPs received lower rises.

BMA have just announced another 'resident' doctor strike continuing to chase pay restoration to 2008 levels.

Having just had the major win with changes to IMG prioritisation and the clamp-down on PAs it feels a bit tone-deaf and I can't see Streeting going for it.

Edit: said outright at 15.00 with a smile emoji ‘many of them will be richer than you’. What the hell, @mumsneedwine , even if it were true? I mean a small percentage are and I am proud that we have state schools good enough to attract pupils with other options, but you clearly meant this as some kind of weird insult.

The strangest on the thread by far.

That is hilarious. You post unsubstantiated opinions as though they were fact, inappropriate and usually unreliable figures out of context, and irrelevant links.

Whether you are conscious of this, I really don't know. But I do know that there is no point in asking questions if you are going to ignore answers that are inconsistent with your world view.

With regard to a propensity for strike action, medical students who have decided to leave the profession almost always cite pay as a reason. I believe that pay is the reason given for the strike.

It is therefore reasonable to assume, until proven otherwise, that individuals who are motivated to leave the profession will also be motivated to strike.

I hope my comments about voters now make sense, @mumsneedwine

About 75% of resident doctors are from state schools and therefore they form a voting block.. In no way does that imply they conspired to vote the same way or practise block voting.

When 75% of voters share any characteristic, people with that characteristic will control the outcome of a ballot.

This says nothing about how they will vote. Although almost all BMA voters (90%) voted for strike action, anyway.

mumsneedwine the comment about strikes originated from anecdote.

Even you will have to admit that you use anecdote on these threads, some might say you almost raise it to an art form. You always seem to have someone ready to hand to illustrate one of your points excellently: eg just having coffee with an ex Oxbridge ex FSM pupil who's just finishing F2 and now can't get a training post or any other job and has just come off a 78 hour week but is v. lovely and his consultant was so keen to hang on to him etc and the nurses baked him cakes too etc.

Don't use anecdote as being of evidential value and then knock it just because it isn't your anecdote.

@Marchesman I think it’s more complex than that. It’s rarely just money that makes someone career change. It’s not liking the job for many reasons. They are not guaranteed to have better career progression, salaries or pension doing something else. They would be working in a different culture though and have different working conditions. That is the fault of the NHS.

When doctors go to the USA and Australia they are getting more money from a private system. Thats clearly something many don’t agree with here but once abroad, it’s fine! Why? Neither country has a nhs and has the values of the nhs. The doctors have accepted all the NHS training paid for by us, and then go.

So yes, possibly money, but the design of the job too - plus I suspect status. A lot of this proposed strike is about their status in society. People for whom our fiscal gratitude knows no bounds. Thats why there are endless threads on getting into medical school and not ones about becoming a social worker. They haven’t worked out that continuing to strike reduces status. Taxpayers feel aggrieved and short changed. Other strikers find this out too and declining status bothers them. Workers who don’t strike any more, eg car workers, are praised for their productivity. How times change!

@TizerorFizz

There are of course many reasons why a lot of juniors are disatisfied with medicine. I have no regrets about my choice, but I wouldn't do it again and I successfully discouraged my children from doing it.

It seems to me that the problems start with undergraduate selection. I recall my medical school, probably around 2000, shifting away from admission based on academic attainment to select for a more diverse and empathetic type of doctor. Empathy, emotional intelligence etc has been touted as more important than "the ability to pass exams" on this thread. It appears to have bypassed educationalists and laypersons that a pathologist doesn't need much of a bedside manner and neither do consultants in probably the majority of specialities. If selection is based on academic ability you get many correlates beyond intelligence such as resilience and delayed gratification that prove to be quite useful in a medical career.

Having selected many of the wrong people, and given them unrealistic expectations, we teach them bedside manner from a premature stage, at the expense of sciences essential to medicine, and then we put them at the coal face for too few hours, for too few years.

I had an opportunity to discuss MMC before its implementation with Kenneth Calman (to whom I took an immediate dislike). It was personally concerning because it took me seven years to find my niche. He had no answer for the career choice aspect but I was assured that formal training would make up for the lack of exposure. I didn't believe it then, but I was unprepared for how useless it would be and how much time it would waste.

Then along came revalidation, mandatory training etc. and the infantilisation of consultants. The whole thing has become so dystopian that I think only privatisation will restore professional autonomy.

There is not much for juniors to look forward to, but paying them more is not going to make any difference.

Please tell me this is a parody.

A mash up might be more accurate.

Ok well the cakes veer into parody (only by a whisker), but nothing else.

About 50% of your posts across several threads have been condescending, and many others offensive. I imagine you make some reasonable points at times but it’s hard to give them any credence when you maintain such an attitude. It’s yet another potentially interesting thread that’s descended into petty argument and ad hominem attacks because of you.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jul/20/nhs-facing-absolutely-shocking-27bn-bill-for-maternity-failings-in-england

A sobering article. The cost of compensation higher than the cost of funding maternity services:

Jeremy Hunt, the former Conservative health secretary, said: “It should be a matter of national shame that we now spend more on maternity litigation than the total cost of running maternity services.”
Hunt said the NHS was still not doing enough to learn from mistakes and the biggest problem was that clinicians fear being sacked for admitting errors.

And yes, a tangent from strikes but not too much of a tangent from the dangers of diluting the standards of admission to and teaching at medical schools.

And the nonsensical idea that all graduates should progress beyond F2.

@Marchesman My point exactly and you’ve expanded on it. Pay is only one element of happiness at work. You describe lots of others.

I also agree sometimes the wrong people are doctors! In general I’ve met very good older doctors and, as I said, I’ve no idea where they went to school and I don’t care. I care about what they know and what they can do. The ones I’ve had difficulty with have been younger and difficult to pin down. I think they dislike taking to relatives of very elderly patients! After weeks of silence. I’m prepared to accept geriatric medicine is the pits. For both doctors and patients.

I agree about resilience too. I’ve certainly seen doctors have doctor dc so not everyone is unhappy with their lot . It’s fairly clear these dc have a big leg up in getting selected.

It looks like with these strikes it is becoming harder to defend the indefensible so junior doctors will not try. I wonder how many representatives are going to face the media or will the BMA dog in with its long term aim of making doctors even wealthier?

The thing that disappoints me most is lack of mention of the patients who surely should be at the core of a doctor's interest?

It’s Labour! They are killing the economy by taxation and having another go in the autumn! The big winners are!!!! The big losers are patients and tax payers. Growth? No chance. The only growth area will be doctors salaries.

But, @mumsneedwine , you’ve gone on st length about how

(a) you are never insulting,

and

(b) you are entitled to your own opinion

Here is another serious violation of (a), and an illustration that with respect to (b) you practise a massive double standard.

I do not have an informed opinion on the question, but will be asking the Consultants in my family (old and young, educated at independent and state schools) what they think.

No blame for the Tories?

@OneMorePiece The Tories didn’t understand business either! Neither provide a supportive climate for industry to grow. None of them. It’s constantly “what can we get out of business” instead of “how can we support business to flourish and provide good quality work and salaries so people thrive. Angela Rayner thinks it’s yet more constraints and rules.

We kept saying the Eu held us back. Now we hold ourselves back by taxing employment. Few governments get a long term strategy right and keep bowing to whoever makes the most noise. MPs dodge the question by saying all that matters is constituents. They don’t see lawmaking and policies that work for every contributor as being their job. Just minorities.

Labour came in saying they would improve things. It’s clear that being anti business won’t improve anything. No growth, no jobs. No money. Not enough taxes. No growth etc etc etc. It’s foolish.

I've held off posting on this thread because to be honest, I have no desire to be attacked the way that mumneedswine has been. And some of the comments are so unbelievably out of touch, pompous and dismissive of the issues facing resident doctors these days as to be truly rage-inducing. I know there are a lot of us reading along who are grateful that someone IS willing to stand up for resident doctors in the face of such hostility, just because she doesn't agree with you.

I'm a mature medical student and mother, nearing the end of my studies (so not a twenty something who can be easily gaslit). I am very concerned about almost all the things she has raised, as are my entire cohort and those above us in FY1/2 and beyond. It's pointless for me to go over much of it though as it is clear most ears are closed.

But I will say that the comments about doctors not choosing certain specialties/being too fussy are simply not accurate, or maybe no longer accurate. Most cannot afford to be fussy anymore. Record numbers of doctors sat the MSRA this year and the minimum cutoffs for many specialities including paeds and radiology rose sharply too with many people even with strong portfolios not getting a NTN.

Anecdotally (much like those claiming the opposite) a decent chunk of the medical students and FYs I know are aiming for GP and Psych. But when exam scores are the main metric and recruitment is centralised, it may be harder to identify those super keen ones as opposed to those applying as a backup (I can guess the argument will be that they aren't good enough but I'd largely disagree). As evidence of the level of interest in GP, the TERS scheme which provided funding to incentivise recruitment to harder to fill areas has been halted for 2025/6 due to record applications and it being deemed no longer necessary.

I say all this knowing you'll probably dismiss me too (maybe because I am state school educated and clearly some kind of radical militant or the 'wrong' type of medical student 🙄) so I won't be replying again but the onslaught against mumneedswine is really painful to read, especially when being used to discredit her many valid arguments.

HermioneHerman unfortunately many senior medics have tried to engage with mumsneedwine but she genuinely seems to have difficulty with data and her response to anyone who tries to engage on any civil basis is met with a personal attack, or at the very least a mocking emoji.

I'm not clear what 'valid arguments' remain; most have been dismantled. Perhaps you could indicate which arguments you think still stand?

Can I ask how you know that 'a lot' of resident doctors are reading along? The few resident doctors that I've pointed this way have glanced at some of the posts and given them very, very short shrift.

Calman wasn’t MMC! He was “Calmanisation” (NTNs for higher training - before my time).

MMC was Shelley Heard and Carol Black. Both of whom were deeply unpleasant people - Prof Black regularly deplored the fact that increasing numbers of women were being admitted to med school, and felt it represented a fall in standards. Except for her of course.