‘We feel dispirited’: striking junior doctors worn down but determined to fight on

“I’m itching to get back to work, to get back to the grindstone,” says Matthew Alexander, a junior radiology doctor. “Nobody wants to be here, nobody wants to be on strike.” Alexander, 30, is one of about 50 junior doctors on a Thursday morning picket line at the Friarage hospital in Northallerton, a bustling market town in Rishi Sunak’s sprawling North Yorkshire constituency.

It’s a sunny day; there’s cheerful, enthusiastic chanting and lots of support from drivers who honk their horns, but it is abundantly clear that only Betty, a laid-back 11-year-old jackapoo, is anywhere approaching happy to be here.

“It is hard,” says Sarah Peters, 26, a junior doctor working in neurosurgery. “Just explaining to family members is hard and knowing that your colleagues are going to have a more difficult day at work because you’re not there. I didn’t come into this profession for this; I came into it to help people, but we have no choice but to strike. It is sad that it has come to this.”

The five-day strike by junior doctors in England is the 11th action in their long-running pay dispute and people on the picket line talk of being worn down by their working conditions – and equally determined to keep on fighting for them to be improved.

“We feel dispirited,” says Tom Sharp, a GP trainee in Leeds. “I think junior doctors are fed up at the poor pay and conditions and that’s why so many are leaving for places like New Zealand, where pay and conditions are so much better.”

He adds: “That sadly has a direct impact on patient care here. People will not get the NHS they deserve.”

Sharp knows people who have left the NHS and moved to other countries. “They will stay there, they won’t return to the NHS,” he says. “I’ve thought about it too. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a doctor who hasn’t thought about it.”

Those sentiments are echoed by Emma Runswick, a junior doctor in Greater Manchester and deputy chair of the BMA council. She has friends who left for New Zealand and were recently back in the UK for a wedding.

“They said: ‘Look at the state of the NHS in this country, look at how much better we have it in New Zealand.’ They are a couple and they are being paid 70% and 100% more than we [her and her partner] are for the same hours. Why? Why would they want to come back? And they work in a service where they are not having to constantly apologise for the delays that we see here. They don’t have to apologise. They are fully staffed.”

Runswick understands that some people look at the 35% pay demand made by the junior doctors and think it seems a lot. “It sounds ridiculous, but it only sounds ridiculous because that’s how much we’ve lost. All we are asking for is the pay we were paid in 2008.”

Runswick says the money the doctors are asking for is a “bargain” in the scheme of things “and not even close to what we might get paid elsewhere”.

It is also a dispute about patient safety, those on the picket line say. Peters says burnout in the NHS is “rampant”, with medics permanently working in understaffed environments.

“The government has had so many opportunities to negotiate,” she says. “My understanding is that they’ve now spent more on the strikes than they would have to give us the pay deal we’ve asked for. When they say there’s no money … there clearly is.”

Some observers have questioned why there needs to be a strike when the current government seems to be on its way out. The shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, has promised to start negotiations on his first day in the job.

The Northallerton picket line is less than 10 minutes from Sunak’s North Yorkshire country house. Runswick says: “We’ve got to deal with the government we have at the moment and that is one led by Rishi Sunak. We have been asking for 20 months for something credible from him. If we don’t take action our pay is going to continue to fall in real terms and our colleagues will continue to leave the country.”

She says the mix of emotions on the picket line is reflected more widely in the NHS. “There has been a lot of despair but actually one thing that the dispute has given doctors is being able to turn that despair into a little bit of anger, a little bit of hope. We are finally doing something about the degradation of the service.”