About 350,000 appointments will be cancelled as junior doctors’ strike is set to bring disruption to the NHS
And the shadow health secretary Wes Streeting has placed responsibility on the prime minister, saying:
The junior doctors’ strike this week will cause huge disruption to patient care. Where is the prime minister and why hasn’t he tried to stop it? Rishi Sunak says he ‘wouldn’t want to get in the middle of’ NHS pay disputes. Patients are crying out for leadership, but instead they are getting weakness.
We were knocking on the health secretary’s door, asking to meet with him to negotiate a settlement to this dispute, long before the current strike got underway.
We have been in a formal dispute since October. He refused to respond and meet us until we had a strike ballot result. He has had months to put a credible offer on the table and avert industrial action, so for him to say, ‘It’s disappointing,’ is at best disingenuous.
