Junior doctor deal: 10k appointments rescheduled due to Wigan hospital strikes
More than 10,000 appointments have been rescheduled due to strikes at Wigan’s hospitals since the end of 2022, new figures show.
The figures were published this week as junior doctors voted to accept a government pay deal, bringing their long-running dispute to an end.
Analysis of NHS England figures shows a total of 10,197 appointments have been rescheduled due to industrial action at hospitals run by Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh Trust (WWL) since December 2022.
Of these, 8,431 were in acute settings, while 667 were community appointments. A further 1,099 were for mental health and learning disabilities.
In addition, 6,641 working days were lost due to strikes.
These figures cover various parts of the NHS workforce – consultants, nurses and other occupations have also been on strike over the past two years – so not every cancelled appointment was with a junior doctor.
Across England, more than 1.5 million appointments have been rescheduled, with over a million working days lost.
Some trusts did not submit data for each round of industrial action.
On Monday the BMA junior doctors committee in England accepted the Government’s pay offer, with 66 per cent of junior doctors voting in favour of the deal.
Dr Trivedi, co-chairman of the BMA’s Junior Doctors Committee, told BBC Breakfast: "This is the first step towards restoring pay, which is all that doctors have wanted since the beginning of this campaign.
"As you’ll know, we’ve had a huge pay cut since 2008, but this marks a change in that trajectory.
"Doctors who were being paid just over £15-an-hour before this offer will now be paid a little over £17-an-hour, so it does mark an improvement, but the journey is not over."
The deal will see junior doctors’ pay rise by between 3.71 per cent and 5.05 per cent – an average of 4.05 per cent – on top of their existing pay award for 2023-24. This will be backdated to April 2023.
Each part of the pay scale will also be uplifted by six per cent, plus £1,000, with an effective date of April 1 2024.
Both rises mean a doctor starting foundation training in the NHS will see base pay increase to £36,600, up from about £32,400.
A full-time doctor entering specialty training will see their pay rise to £49,900 from about £43,900.