NHS junior doctors across Sheffield have joined a national 72-hour strike over a dispute about pay after their real-term income fell by 26% since 2008.
The British Medical Association (BMA) has demanded a 35% pay increase to account for 15 years of inflation, but the Health Secretary, Steve Barclay, said it is “simply unaffordable”.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has criticised the BMA’s method of measuring inflation with the Retail Price Index (RPI).
The they added that it is an outdated way to look at rising prices, a move which BMA defends because they have factored in rising house prices.
RPI as an inflation measure was stopped in 2013 by the ONS, in which they said: “our position on RPI is clear: we do not think it is a good measure of inflation and discourage its use”.
Under the more commonly used measurement, Consumer Prices Index (CPI), the ONS has concluded that there has been a 16% fall in real-term income for junior doctors.
Some critics have argued that the RPI measurement has taken advantage of the current cost of living crisis and is not representative of long-term price levels, so in the current economic climate, everyone has faced similar lower real-term incomes.
Jenny Dale, 28, a paediatric Junior doctor at Sheffield Children’s Hospital said: “You are actively saving people’s lives, and it’s a huge responsibility. You are working nightshifts and weekends, so it has a massive impact on your life, and I feel massively undervalued and underappreciated.
“The way it is going at the moment with mortgages and interest rates, it is essentially not enough to pay for the job that we do and the responsibility we have for our patients either.”
Junior doctors account for around 45% of the NHS workforce and the three-day strikes caused tens of thousands of appointments to be delayed especially cancer treatments.
The BMA has said that a newly qualified doctor has a starting wage of £14 an hour, the same amount as an experienced barista for Pret-A-Manger.
Mike Thackery, 29, a paediatric A&E doctor at Sheffield Children’s said: “I could have been earning so much more in a profession that I hadn’t trained 6 years for and not gained £70,000 of debt”.
“I think it’s no wonder why so many of us are leaving the profession and it’s causing more and more problems in an already broken system.”
Doctors within the union say that they do not feel supported by the government and are taken for granted and therefore, they have no choice but to use industrial action.
