The British Medical Association has not ruled out staging a permanent junior doctors’ strike and mass resignation of trainees ahead of this week’s 48-hour walkout, which for the first time will include A&E units, in the dispute over new contracts.



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On Monday, a day before the unprecedented action is due to start, a junior doctor announced his intention to resign live on television over the government’s imposition of the contract. Dr Ben White told ITV’s Good Morning Britain he would be leaving his post to focus on fighting the contract.

White, who is one of a group doctors seeking a high court challenge against the contract, said: “I have taken the decision that I am resigning as a trainee doctor to focus on a legal campaign to fight the contract on behalf of my patients and on behalf of the NHS.”

He added: “I really feel like we have been backed into a corner and there’s not a lot of sense coming out of the government’s side of things.”



Meanwhile, the BMA chairman, Mark Porter, confirmed that junior doctors were considering possible mass resignations as a way of escalating the dispute. Emails from the association’s junior doctors committee leaked to the Health Service Journal last week outlined possible ways the action could be stepped up, including a permanent walkout, the mass resignation of trainees and a recommendation that doctors seek jobs outside the NHS.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Porter said: “There is a lot of discussion among junior doctors about what steps might be taken if the government fails to respond to the industrial action this week, and no decisions have yet been taken which means they are all possible, but that doesn’t mean they are all likely or are going to happen.”

Porter accused the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, of mudslinging by claiming that junior doctors would be putting lives at risk if they go ahead with the planned all-out 48-hour strike which is due to start at 8am on Tuesday.

The NHS has already cancelled 125,000 operations and appointments in preparation.

Porter said: “The health secretary is trying to find some way to throw mud at the junior doctors of this country who have been providing weekend and night emergency cover since the NHS started.”

He added: “It is not true that emergency care is being withdrawn on Tuesday and Wednesday. It is true that junior doctors won’t be providing it, but hospitals across England will be full of senior doctors who will be delivering that care.”

Porter accused Hunt of refusing negotiate about averting a strike by ruling out discussion over the new contract. “The government has left junior doctors no alternative other than what’s happening this week.



“We have said repeatedly and always said that we will call off the strike if the government will call off the imposition. By contrast, the government has said, over the weekend, that there is nothing that will get it to call off the imposition.”

Clare Marx, the president of the Royal College of Surgeons, urged both sides to agree to talks, but said she would not contemplate strike action herself if she were a junior doctor. “I personally would not countenance a situation where I would be withdrawing my labour,” she told Today.

“I know there are many doctors who are having great difficulty in justifying withdrawing labour from emergencies and undoubtedly those doctors will not walk out tomorrow.”

She added: “I would just urge the government and the BMA to get into talks together at this very last stage, to try to make a resolution by each of them recognising that the patients need to be cared for … and it is not about winning on either side. At the moment they are both losing.”

Hunt rejected an eleventh-hour compromise, produced by a cross-party group of MPs, that would have led to the strike being called off in return for his agreement to pilot his controversial changes to junior doctors’ terms and conditions.

The olive branch, which was backed by the BMA, was offered in a letter from Heidi Alexander, the shadow health secretary; the Lib Dem MP and former coalition health minister Norman Lamb; Dr Dan Poulter, a Conservative MP and, like Lamb, a member of Hunt’s ministerial team until last May; and Dr Philippa Whitford, an SNP MP who is also an NHS breast cancer doctor.

Hunt dismissed the plan, saying on his Twitter feed: “Labour ‘plan’ is opportunism. Any further delay [to imposing the contract] just means we will take longer to eliminate [the] weekend effect [of higher death rates among patients admitted to hospital on a Saturday or Sunday].”