This week the BMA ballots doctors on whether to take industrial action over pension reforms which if implemented would see them working longer and paying in more for substantially less.

Health professionals have an advantage over other public sector pension scheme members in that the NHS arrangements are self-financing and in surplus begging the question why fix what isn't broke? The answer, unions say, is that they are being made to pay for a deficit run up by bankers who far from being 'all in it together' to pay it off and have been rewarded with a 5% income tax cut.

This is a good starting position for doctors. The NHS reforms aside, the government has shown, from forest sell-offs to jets on aircraft carriers, it will perform embarrassing U-turns if the public clamour is great enough.

The hugely unpopular NHS reforms provide doctors with the best chance of winning because without their co-operation the change to the new system cannot work. Doctors should strike by actually working more, for patient care, in the time saved by withdrawing from the transition work to the new arrangements under the Health and Social Care Act.

Although the role of doctors is not as central to the reforms as ministers make out, GPs in particular are vital in providing the logistics. If doctors were to stop co-operating in the transition from primary care trusts (PCTs) to clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), the government would be left with a choice between abandoning NHS pension reform and scrapping the entire NHS reforms that cost them so much to get on to the statute book.

As soon as April 2013 PCTs are to shut up shop permanently and hand over to GP-led CCGs. Already the system is in flux and if GPs and other doctors were to refuse to attend transition meetings and fill out the required paperwork the, already fragile, Department of Health would suffer.

Ministers would be left with a choice between giving the doctors what they want on pensions, which after all is not an unreasonable set of demands, or seeing their policy back in the headlines and heading for the rocks.

This sort of industrial action would have the added benefit of having no direct or at least immediate impact on patient care and will play much better with the press and the public than any other sort of withdrawal of labour by doctors.

It would be hard for even the Daily Mail to attack GPs for prioritising patient care over bureaucratic meetings and paperwork. Add to this that most of the profession, more than 90% in the last Royal College of GPs poll, are against the reforms they would be sabotaging and you have a winning formula.

Ministers would be very hard pressed to paint this sort of action as an irresponsible risk to the welfare of patients but it would cause them acute embarrassment and could prove fatal to the government itself unless they gave in.

I urge doctors to win their pension dispute by dragging the highly dangerous NHS reforms back on to the front-pages.

Edward Davie is a Labour councillor and chair of Lambeth council health scrutiny committee.

This article is published by Guardian Professional. Join the healthcare network to receive regular emails and exclusive offers.