It was a close-run thing. With just hours to spare before thousands of resident doctors were set to walk out across England, the government blinked first.
The planned strike, which had been due to begin at 07:00 BST on Monday morning and run through to Friday, has been called off after the government tabled a new offer that the British Medical Association (BMA) considered worth pausing for. Details of the offer are still being worked through, but the last-minute intervention has at least bought both sides a little breathing room.
Resident doctors, formerly known as junior doctors, have been locked in a bitter dispute with the government over pay for the better part of two years. The BMA has long argued that their members have suffered a real-terms pay cut of around 26% since 2008, a figure the government has repeatedly pushed back on.
“We’ve always said we’d rather be at the negotiating table than on the picket line,” one BMA representative noted, reflecting the cautious optimism that greeted the news within the profession.
For patients and NHS trusts, the timing will come as a relief. Strikes earlier this year led to hundreds of thousands of cancelled appointments and procedures, piling pressure onto a health service already creaking under record waiting lists. Hospital managers had spent recent days drawing up contingency plans, bracing for another brutal week.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who made resolving the junior doctors dispute a personal priority when Labour came to power, has staked considerable political capital on getting a deal done. Whether this latest offer forms the basis of a lasting settlement, or simply delays another walkout, remains to be seen.
The BMA’s resident doctors committee is expected to put any final agreement to its members for a ballot before anything is signed off. That process alone could take several weeks.
So the crisis has been paused, not resolved. The question now is whether both sides can turn this fragile moment into something that actually sticks.
