Industrial action starts tomorrow

January 2, 2024

Message from Richard Beeken, Chief Executive:

Tomorrow at 7am will mark the start of the longest period of industrial action by our non-consultant doctors, who are striking for six days – until 7am on Tuesday 9 January.

The first week of January is always a difficult time of year for NHS services and this will make it even harder – this strike represents the highest level of risk yet. I am under no illusions as to the pressure you will all be working under. Your efforts so far have been amazing, but we must keep going, we must all support each other.

I know it is not going to be easy, but I want to remind you of our two objectives to keep focused on:

• To support our non-consultant doctors in their right to take industrial action
• To keep our patients safe whilst they do so.

We have a collective responsibility to keep our patients safe and treated and we need to maintain urgent and emergency care. The action will mean significant cancellations of elective activity, clinics, and procedure lists.

We need your support – we need to mobilise our teams in a way in which we saw during the first round of strike action, with a particular focus on AMU/medicine out of hours/overnight. We require clinicians to work at junior doctor level, and as such general internal medicine (GIM) accreditation is not a must. Shifts will be remunerated at BMA rate card rates – please refer to the Industrial Action connect page.

If you feel you can offer support, please contact Jayne Redfern to discuss.

Thank you for your ongoing support – I do appreciate how difficult this is for all concerned, but our focus must always be on maintaining patient safety.

Kind regards,

Richard