“Used and Abused”: UK’s burnt out junior doctors to go on strike

London:

Poh Wang is planning to go on strike next week with thousands of other British junior doctors fed up with a government saying he is overworked, underpaid and burdened with a student loan debt. burdened with a debt they can’t even imagine paying.

The 28-year-old says she and her colleagues have been pushed to the brink after paying below-inflation pay raises that have been hit by rising costs of living, leading her to question whether she will ever be able to earn her £85,000 How can a student pay more than ($101,000). loan.

On top of that, he remains angry at his treatment during the pandemic, when he felt powerless to deal with the onslaught of patients arriving at the hospital with COVID-19 symptoms – saying that public displays of support paid off the bills. not paid.

He joined junior doctors across England who will go on strike for three days on 13 March, protesting pay and burnout will risk driving staff out of the health service as it grapples with record-high patient waiting lists. settles.

“We have reached a boiling point where we’ve had enough,” said Poh Wang, a council member of the British Medical Association (BMA).

“The anger is palpable that we were used and abused and devalued to such an extent.”

The son of Chinese immigrants who ran a takeaway restaurant in Chester, northern England, Poh Wang became a doctor because he enjoyed helping people. After attending medical school for six years, he has worked for five, two in specialty training as a psychiatrist.

Junior doctors are qualified doctors, often with many years of experience, who work under the guidance of senior doctors and represent a large part of the country’s medical community.

He is paid around £40,000 a year for his base of 40 hours a week, and works extra hours which can add up to around 48 hours a week. He rents a room in a shared flat in west London, an option that can cost around £1,000 a month.

‘above and beyond’

At the start of the pandemic, Poh Wang worked as an emergency medicine doctor in South London, where she and her colleagues had to make difficult decisions, and comfort patients who could not be admitted to intensive care units It was because they were full.

“We went above and beyond to do everything we could,” he said.

He said the fact he is now struggling to get by financially, as food inflation in the UK has reached 17%, is making him and his colleagues bitter about the past few years.

“We hate the sound of clapping, clapping, because it’s empty,” Poh Wang said, referring to Britain’s Clap for Our Carers campaign for health workers during the height of the pandemic.

“If you value us and pay us appropriately for what we have done and the sacrifices we have made.”

The BMA says junior doctors’ take-home pay has been cut by more than a quarter over the past 15 years when using the retail price index (RPI) gauge of inflation.

It says its members overwhelmingly voted for the strike.

The junior doctors’ walkout will add further pressure on the state-funded National Health Service (NHS), which is facing waves of strikes by nurses, ambulance workers and other staff.

Daniel Zahedi, 27, is another junior doctor who plans to go on strike on Monday. He describes his hospital in Cambridge, eastern England, as chronically understaffed and struggling.

“A lot of times we don’t have enough,” said Daniel Zahedi.

As a first-year doctor after his medical degree, Daniel Zahedi said he gets around ₹29,000 per year as a base salary for a minimum of 40 hours per week. He said he worked about 60 hours this week, which was slightly above average but “not unusual”. His student loan debt is around £100,000.

“It’s not just 100 grand as a student, you pay to be a member of your Royal College, you pay to take exams, even to progress in your career.”

As things stand, Daniel Zahedi said, he can’t see himself staying in the profession for long, despite his love for the job.

“People are getting burned left, right and center — where salaries are going down year after year, where conditions are getting worse, where patient care is suffering,” he said.

“They’re feeling they’re undervalued and people are leaving.”

In January, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak outlined the need to cut hospital waiting times as one of his government’s five priorities.

Battling a strike in several sectors, including by train drivers and teachers, the government has said a freeze on public sector salaries is needed to bring double-digit inflation under control.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)