Resident doctors announce six days of strike action in England The Voice and Stand of Resident Doctors Is for the Interests of All Health Workers and NHS Patients Volume 56 Number 10, April 4, 2026 ARCHIVE JBCENTRE Resident doctors announce six days of strike action in England The Voice and Stand of Resident Doctors Is for the Interests of All Health Workers and NHS Patients BMA Picket Sheffield Hospital, November 2025 - Photo: Whats App The BMA's Resident Doctors Committee (RDC) announced in a press release on March 25, that following weeks of talks with Government, they had determined that the Health Secretary's final offer was insufficient and called further strike action in England [1]. The action will run from 7am on April 7 to 6.59am on April 13. It should be remembered that the present government opposed the previous government of Sunak for not negotiating with the doctors and promised to the electorate before coming to power that they would achieve a "negotiated settlement" with the doctors. Yet once again, government has refused to negotiate a solution to the concerns of the doctors who are fighting against the unsafe shortage of resident doctors, their training in our hospitals and their collapsing pay level. This is why the doctors continue to say to the government that Enough Is Enough! Dr Jack Fletcher, chair of RDC, said: "We have been negotiating in good faith for weeks to try and end the simultaneous pay and jobs crises for resident doctors. Frustratingly we had been making good progress right up until the point, in the last two weeks, when the Government began to shift the goalposts." He remarked that with the government "as talks progressed it became clear that the money proposed for pay increases was now going to be spread over three years", that "combined with today's pay review body (DDRB) recommendation of a 3.5% uplift pointing to yet more years in which our pay, at best, barely treads water" and that the RDC is "simply not going to put an offer to doctors that risks locking in further erosion of pay at a time when doctors continue to leave the UK for other countries." He concluded that the RDC "remain willing to negotiate and are eager to get a deal done if we can simply recapture the early positive spirit of negotiations. No strikes need to happen, but Government will need to act fast to prevent them." The government responded to the announcement of the RDC strike action the next day with Health Secretary Wes Streeting presenting to Parliament a justification for not meeting the doctors demands [2]. He claimed that the RDC rejected an "historic deal". Yet he then admitted to Parliament that "we were optimistic that it would be received positively, albeit I was aware of the officers' preference that this should be a deal over two years rather than three years, and that they had expected the independent DDRB recommendation to come out slightly higher than it did". In other words, the offer was considerably worse than the terms that had been negotiated with the RDC previously. The government's arrogant response soon degenerated from Wes Streeting's plea that Parliament "urge the committee to reconsider" and "call off their strike" to the usual government propaganda and threats against the doctors to accept their "historic deal". Just a week later, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer writing in the Times labelled the BMA's rejection of the deal "reckless" and said that it "benefits no one" and, metaphorically petulantly stamping his foot, he gave resident doctors 48 hours to call off their strike or lose the training offer [3]. Now Wes Streeting was no longer "urging" but he and Starmer have vindictively told the BMA, at the same time punishing NHS staff and patients, that those "1,000 extra slots in specialist training will be scrapped unless it accepts the deal". This referred to the paltry government offer of a pledge to increase the number of places available in specialist medical training by up to 4,500 over the next three years to help more early-career doctors start training in their chosen speciality. About 1,000 doctors were due to step into those roles from this August. Yet the scale of the problem as outlined by the BMA last year in negotiations was that there were now 30,000 doctors applying for 10,000 training posts with even many of those existing training posts going to overseas applicants only. This was forcing resident doctors to apply abroad and leave the country when they were needed for our NHS. According to a BBC report on Thursday, the government, whilst refusing to open meaningful negotiations, has indeed vindictively withdrawn even this paltry offer of creating 1,000 more doctor training posts in England "after the British Medical Association (BMA) refused to call off a six-day strike next week". The BMA and its RDC has rejected these government threats. Dr Jack Fletcher, the chair of the RDC, wrote in a letter to the health secretary on Wednesday as reported in The Guardian : "The political rhetoric - threatening to remove training places - coupled with the way the government has communicated the offer, has needlessly and avoidably inflamed the dispute, ultimately pushing the chance of a deal further away. A final offer followed by threats that parts of the offer may be withdrawn is not the way to end this dispute." [4] In other words, the government's claim that it is negotiating is once again exposed as completely false alongside the previous governments before it. There is no acknowledgment of, or alarm at the context, that why is it in the modern age doctors are forced to go on strike to defend their jobs and their pay when the NHS needs them more and more? There is no acknowledgment of the deep crisis that the government and previous governments have created in the NHS. There is no acknowledgment that it is the government and the cartel party system in power that is responsible. It is the government and not the doctors that have underfunded the health care system by "reckless" measures that "benefits no one". It is successive governments who have refused to invest in the NHS as a vital public health care system. They are responsible for diverting the existing already reduced funds to privatise profitable services and Private Finance Initiatives and at huge costs to patient care. In refusing to negotiate, Starmer adopts a similar criminal reckless, arbitrary and irrational posture to Donald Trump, in diverting the whole economy away from public services to war preparations and funding the priorities of the big corporations. It is these interests that they directly serve. It is this and not the doctors that has left so many patients to face death and harm waiting for timely treatment in a compromised healthcare system which the NHS has further become. It has also been revealed this week that the government's cynical agenda may be to try and justify even further massive cuts on the NHS and further destroy medical services when NHS England chief executive Sir Jim Mackey told the Health Service Journal on Thursday that "the NHS will accelerate work to design clinical models less reliant on resident doctors in response to continuing strike action by medics". Yet Starmer is diverting funds left, right and centre to militarise the economy and place it on a war footing, Workers' Weekly , writing in support of the doctors' strike last December, pointed out: "As the doctors take their action, they are supported with more and more people who see the frustration of the doctors and their new resolve that Enough Is Enough! They are strongly pointing out that more than a decade of real-terms pay erosion for doctors, worsening conditions and increasing shortage of doctors in our hospitals is applicable, not only to doctors, but to nurses and the whole health team, and that it is unacceptable in a modern society. "The fight against the running down of the work force in our NHS, their jobs, pay and conditions must get the full support of the working class and people. The NHS human-centred workforce is a workforce which is vital to treat the most immediate and urgent needs, as well as dealing with all of the complex human health needs. In a modern society, health care is a right for all with access for patients to the right care and at the right time." [5] The voice and stand of resident doctors must be heeded as it represents the interests of all health workers and NHS patients. Notes 1. Resident doctors announce six days of strike action in England after Government offer rejected by BMA media team, March 25th 2. Oral statement to Parliament - Proposed industrial action by resident doctors, March 26 3. Keir Starmer gives resident doctors 48 hours to call off strike or lose training offer, The Guardian , March 31 4. Resident doctors accuse Keir Starmer of sabotaging talks to end pay and jobs dispute, The Guardian , April 1 5. Resident Doctors Reject the Government's Denial of Proper Job Restoration, their Insults and Rushed Half-Measures, Workers' Weekly , December 20 2025 Link to Full Issue of Workers' Weekly RCPB(ML) Home Page Workers' Weekly Online Archive