Why doctors like me strike |
Doctors are currently facing a moral dilemma. Strike, and risk potential harm to patients, or continue, and face the personal consequences. We chose this career, and most will be conflicted.
Do I condone strike action? No, but I can’t entirely condemn it either. Though media coverage often reductively attributes striking to money, the reasons run deeper. They are about working conditions, respect and long-term opportunity, all of which have been eroded, in parallel with pay. We often see opinions on strike action presented by commentators who are no longer practicing medicine. I struggle to reconcile with these views. The work today is not comparable.
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I am lucky – I’ve reached the top. But I am concerned for my younger colleagues. They will work years towards a job in a system that no longer seems to respect them, with more debt than any other generation, and few of the benefits of years gone by. With job market bottlenecks, some will even be forced out of medicine or abroad.
I could talk about pension taxation and real terms pay decline, but we know that already. What we don’t talk about is the human cost of this work, and how that can erode one of the most important........