Adam Baker

This is the sad reality of a normal day in the NHS. No strikes, No excuses. Yet we’ve got fully qualified doctors sitting unemployed while patients are left waiting 21 hours in A&E. Years of mismanagement and catastrophic workforce planning failure. What a betrayal to patients

If you want more doctors from working class homes @wesstreeting you need to make medicine an attractive career. Graduating with £100,000+ of student debt, then earning 40% less than your assistant is not a great incentive.

A 3.5% pay uplift is a real terms pay cut for consultants in England. The role of consultant should be fully valued, including pay, hours worked and its complexity. We need to stand together to demand a better deal. We are opening a ballot for industrial action on 11 May

MP pay uplift 5%. Doctor pay uplift 3.5%. The money is always there for MPs, not for anyone else.

✅ The Medical Training (Prioritisation) Bill has received Royal Assent. 🇬🇧 An essential step towards ending the fierce competition that's stifled UK medical talent. Supporting a sustainable NHS workforce that meets the health needs of patients. More: england.nhs.uk/long-read/medi…

MSRA has been used as a tool to make recruitment less hassle for recruitment bodies. It’s a blunt, ugly tool that fails to recognise the humanity and skills of highly trained professionals. Bin it off.

Let's give them the full data shall we @DHSCgovuk and while we are here, let's talk about why I am striking. I started medical school in 2019. Prior to that I was an intensive care nurse. I left to (hopefully) become an anaesthetist. When I started medical school the competition ratio to start anaesthetic training was 2.35 to 1. I had quite a good chance of getting a job. At that point we prioritised UK medical graduates as well. Since then the ratios have risen and are now a little under 13 to 1. Over that time doctors’ pay also continued to be eroded. Even though it had fallen before I started, it continued to fall after I started. I'm now applying for speciality jobs. I've done my 5 years of medical school and 16 months as a doctor. I'm applying and having to go up against 13 other people for each job. All the while, the waiting list is increasing because anaesthetists are needed to facilitate operations every day. In August, if I don't get a job I will be unemployed. A well-trained doctor that the public have invested hundreds of thousands of pounds in training will not be seeing patients. I'll be doing whatever job I can get to pay the bills. There are thousands like me. Thousands who want to train to be the surgeons, GPs and anaesthetists of tomorrow but can’t. But why is this happening? Firstly a workforce planning issue. Successive governments have not increased training numbers over the years. In fact, in some specialties such as surgery there are fewer training numbers than previously. This is a Government planning failure, they have not trained enough specialist doctors. Secondly we are training thousands of doctors each year with the aim to train 15,000 medical students a year in the future to become doctors. There are more and more doctors entering the system, trying to train to become specialists, but no reciprocal increase in higher training numbers. Thirdly there is the issue that doctors who have never worked in the NHS can apply for training posts in the UK, some whilst not even being in the UK at the time of applying. Other countries prioritise the doctors they train, the UK does not. We currently produce enough doctors to fill training posts if they existed, and we have such a surplus that it will take years for the numbers to even out if we stopped more doctors being added today. For example, if I left for Australia (I cant btw), they would likely welcome me. But if I wanted to enter training, I would be put BEHIND all of the doctors that had trained in their country. This is how it works in every other country. We need to sort out the jobs crisis now. We need to secure training for the doctors taxpayers have invested in but also protect the people that have already come here. We should not be prioritising international recruitment into UK training programmes ahead of doctors who trained here and have already served two years in the NHS. With pay, we need to keep the doctors we train here and in the NHS. Doctors don't feel valued for the work they do. These doctors are the ones you see at 3am with your unwell child, your bowel obstruction or after a car crash. These resident doctors are not just foundation doctors. They are the senior registrars who save your life, remove your child's appendix in the middle of the night, resuscitate your mum or dad when they have a cardiac arrest. These doctors are literally saving lives 24/7. When I was an F1 on general surgery, I was the first point of contact overnight for 100 patients. I had to deal with post-op bleeds, sepsis, heart attacks, and anything else that came up really. Yes, I had support but that wasn't always immediately available (the registrar might have been operating) so I HAD to deal with it. All for (at the time) less than £18 per hour base pay. Yes, people can argue that there are night enhancements, but I did the same job during the day too when the registrars were again in theatre, as they should be. You can talk percentages all day long, they sound big. But 50% of one pound, which sounds big, is 50p. Let’s talk pounds and pence. We are asking for the F1 doctor, the first person you see, £22.67/ph. For the registrar that removes your child's appendix at midnight, saving their life? £38.28/ph. I don't know about you, but that's a bargain. Most importantly, we are not asking for this all at once. We want the journey @wesstreeting has spoken about. We are responsible people, you trust us with your lives, your children's lives, every day. We just want to be paid what we were worth before COVID. All of this costs money, but what are you paying for? You aren't paying, you're investing. You're investing into the NHS of tomorrow. You're investing in training the GP so you can get an appointment, the consultant that can help you, the surgeon that can replace your hip, and the registrar that saves your child's life at 11pm on a Wednesday. That's why I'm striking. @BMAResidents

Friendly reminder to @BMAResidents that FY1s and FY2s will not continue their memberships if they are unemployed or not in the profession. In fact, union membership will probably be the first thing they cancel if they were unemployed. Something to bare in mind.

man i literally did MRCP part 1, have an MSc in immunology from a SCHOLARSHIP THE RCP GAVE ME (which doesn’t count for anything), and a PGCert in MedEd etc etc and got rejected from IMT what’s the point lol

Super proud of everyone in @UoNResponders for the work we do for patients in Nottingham 🚑 #FPHC2025 @EMASNHSTrust @MedicineUoN @UniofNottingham @EMAS_CFR

Just remember if you can’t see a doctor - this is @wesstreeting fault, this is why doctors are striking The power to fix the NHS and end these strikes lies with Wes and the government

Santorini 🏺

Our ballot for FY1 doctors in England is open. Let’s send a clear message to Government: the specialty training crisis needs fixing now. Vote YES for industrial action today bma.org.uk/our-campaigns/… #PayRestoration #EndTrainingCrisis

Clearly there is a nursing requirement for patients in plastic surgery. Mobility, hygiene, wound healing, graft viability, dressings (type/size/application etc!!), patient education, and patient advocacy all of which become increasingly important with increasing patient co-morbidities and complexities. And clearly we need to value clinical nurses in order to retain them for patients (and doctors!) to have access to qualified and high skilled nursing care. Having a parallel clinic of doctors and nurses working along side each other would make sense for this. This is teamwork, this is support. But the idea that a nurse can supervise a doctor clearly means something has gone wrong. Just as it would be for a doctor supervising a nurse. We are different disciplines with different roles. We do different jobs. Yes, there is some overlap which allows us to understand each other but that does not mean we are interchangeable and it is an insult to both professions to suggest that we could be. This video is not an example of working together. This is not teamwork. This is not support. This is substitution.

I know this is a bit random, but imagine if the government guaranteed jobs for all doctors now driving Ubers or delivering pizzas!

📣 Five days of strike action starts today. These strikes could have been averted, if @Wesstreeting had a credible offer for us to consider. ✊ Find your nearest picket: bma.org.uk/rdpicketlines Stick Together. Strike Together. Win Together.

@loddyy24 When I was a med student I ran (@UoNResponders) we have around 60 active responders working across various levels of scopes of practice throughout years of medicine and other healthcare courses. Always saw the benefits of other healthcare courses responding with us.

A 4% pay uplift, less than current inflation, is an insult to doctors in England. This Government has shown it simply doesn’t value doctors.   “The DDRB has failed doctors. If this is the best they can do, government needs to think again.” says @DrPhilBanfield   This ‘award’ pushes #PayRestoration even further out of reach, and doctors even further from the NHS. No one wants a return to scenes of doctors on picket lines but today’s actions have sadly made this look far more likely. bma.org.uk/news-and-opini…

Doctors earn £17.56ph, still 22% behind 2008 levels, face multiple other assaults 2.8% ‘uplift’ floated by @UKLabour 4 months ago, still no reassurances Doctors deserve better It was clear we need to ballot. Now even more so. Update details: Myaccount.bma.org.uk /1