‘Without a sustainable workforce there may not be an NHS in the future’ - Junior doctors on the picket line

JUNIOR doctors were back on the picket line on Wednesday staging protests outside Royal Victoria Hospital with their placards, dogs and even bagpipes.

Staging their first ever 24-hour walkout on March 6, the latest action lasts until Friday morning with another 48-hour strike planned for June 6-7.

Their demands include full pay restoration, with estimates that junior doctor pay has been eroded by 30% since 2008.

Hannah Patterson (27) works in Antrim Area Hospital.

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“We feel we’ve been driven to the point where we don’t have a choice,” she told the Irish News.

“The system is under more pressure than ever, we have an ageing population, we don’t have enough resources and for us personally it’s mentally and emotionally exhausting knowing that we can’t do our jobs as well as we are trained to do.”

While appreciating the budgetary pressures facing the Health Minister Robin Swann, she said there was more at stake than just pay.

“If we’re not able to make a sustainable workforce there may not be an NHS in the future,” she said.

Gareth May (30) works in Musgrave Hospital as a medical trainee and spent his first day off in a week on the picket line.

“The most overwhelming feeling is sadness, I don’t want to be here on the street. I want to be in looking after my patients,” he said.

“I want to be continuing my career as a doctor, I feel I’m at a wall now and I can’t really progress until various structural issues with our contract are addressed.”

Having trained in Scotland where the government and the British Medical Association (BMA) reached a pay deal, he said there was “a high attraction” to moving back.

To patients missing their appointments this week, he added: “We really are sorry, we want to be there for you. But this is for not only us but yourselves in the long run.”

Marus Hollyer (32), an internal medicine doctor at the Royal, trained in Scotland and has worked in Northern Ireland for five years.

He is also seriously considering a move back to Scotland after sensing “a lack of constructive commitment” from Stormont.

“Some of my colleagues here, the strikes are falling in the middle of their 12-day stretch.

“(That) is very challenging, working in difficult conditions where A&E is full to bursting.

“We have patients here in the Royal who are nursed on beds in corridors in the wards because there aren’t enough spaces.

“It’s a moral injury because people are coming into work and not giving the level of care we want to be able to give.”

On the budgetary pressures facing the health service, he said: “How and where money is spent is a political choice. There’s money there, it’s how they choose to spend it.

“They’ve spent millions on a new computer system and other things. Other parts of the public sector like politicians get pay rises, so why shouldn’t doctors and nurses?”