It hurts. It's unbearable sometimes.
There have been many, many times I've thought, I'm just quitting.
There have been so many occasions when I've walked onto the ward
and it has been unsafe because of the levels of staffing.
You feel devalued, you feel a little bit worthless.
You feel like you're not appreciated for what you do.
Adele is a junior doctor in the UK's National Health Service
who walked out of her hospital in a four-day strike in April,
which led to more than 195,000 missed appointments.
Claps don’t pay the bills, claps don’t pay the bills.
In the first half of 2023,
the number of canceled appointments amounted to almost half a million
as the medical sector took part in the UK's union actions.
Over the past year, the UK has recorded the largest number of strikes
since the 1980s, with sectors from health care to postal service workers
and teachers all taking industrial action.
It is not a coincidence that they come at a time
when the cost of living crisis is cutting into the pockets of the nation,
with the cost of basic necessities rocketing to new levels.
Industrial action is having a serious impact
on the quality of patient care.
Last week’s strike by junior doctors caused
the cancelation of almost 200,000 operations and appointments.
The only thing we can really do is strike, and the only cause
we can really legitimately strike about is our pay.
But it's sort of an indicator for loads of other stuff.
Junior doctors are asking for a 35% pay increase.
This round of pay negotiations reflects both the acute squeeze
created by high inflation now and more than a decade of inadequate
funding that has seen public sector workers
fall way behind their private sector counterparts.
So, junior doctors, their pay has increased by about 16% in cash terms since 2008.
But in that same period, inflation and other factors mean that
they’re actually 25% worse off, and they’re just saying enough is enough.
I've been a junior doctor for four years now.
I'm doing a ten-month long contract in plastic surgery
just to get the experience I need in order to try
and make a successful application for my actual training post.
My current job has a higher base salary,
so it's about £40,000, but I never do night shifts.
The extra hours, the night shifts, they really do make up
the bulk of our salaries.
So when you factor all that together, I've actually taken a pretty decent pay cut.
I will usually be scheduled
to work with one of the consultants in the operating theaters.
Within plastic surgery, there's loads of different things you could be doing.
There's hand surgeries.
You can do breast surgery,
so it's a lot of cancer surgery.
Plastic surgery includes burns.
So you might be doing skin grafting.
Plastic surgeons can do cleft lip and palate surgery.
They can do head and neck surgery, which is largely taking tumors.
At the moment, I'm on-call.
I started my on-call shift
on Saturday and I will go straight through until this Friday.
And during those shifts we then have to do trauma clinics.
So there's an awful lot of strain within the NHS,
and the more people are struggling,
the more people are burning out.
Since I started work it’s not been uncommon
to hear someone say that
one of their colleagues has committed suicide.
According to the British Medical Association, around seven in ten
junior doctors surveyed say they always or frequently work in understaffed rotas,
which may be placing patient and staff safety at risk.
Around half of junior doctors described their desire to work in the NHS
in the next year as low or very low.
When you first move into a new house,
all sorts of things spring up that you weren't expecting to pay for.
When I started my new job, there was a mistake made
with my pay and it's taken five months to get that resolved.
I've been consistently worrying about money, consistently in my overdraft.
If any unexpected thing happens, you always feel
just a heartbeat away from absolute disaster, to be honest.
So when it comes to pay in the NHS, the government says that it’s set
by these independent peer review bodies, which they say they can't really interfere with.
These peer review bodies,
they will gather evidence over the course of the year,
they give their recommendation for maybe a two, three, five percent pay rise,
and although, you know, these strikes are directed
at the government, the government is trying to,
take their hands out of it and say it's not really our deal.
At the same time,
we're getting in a bit of an impasse right now. Junior doctors are asking for
what's called full pay restoration, which would be a 35% pay rise right now.
The government is saying that is completely unaffordable
and unacceptable and they have to lower that.
You know, there are some things that you see at work
or that you do at work that if you were to say them
to a person who doesn't work in health care,
they just wouldn't understand why you're upset.
Did you work last night?
Yeah. So this is night three of four for me.
So I'm slightly delirious, but it’s OK, we're going to get through it.
So I think pay is a difficult issue.
On bank holidays, the person in the hospital paid the least is
the F1, so the junior doctor who's been a doctor for a year.
So you get paid more in the hospital to clean toilets on a bank holiday.
It hasn't been safe for many years and I don't think that will come
as a shock to anyone.
There is nowhere else that a junior doctor can work.
We can't even work in private hospitals
because the reason people go private is to ensure that
they get seen by a consultant.
So really our only options are ditch the NHS entirely.
A lot of people have moved to places like Australia
and New Zealand, where you are valued more highly.
About two out of five doctors said in a recent poll
that they are looking to leave the NHS or would accept another job
if that was proposed.
And 80% are actually saying that
they are constantly thinking about ways out as well.
The ability to continue striking is what's proving difficult because,
you know, we're striking because we are not being paid enough
and we therefore don't really have the ability
to take that much unpaid leave from our work.
So I think the longer the strikes go on, the more difficult it's going to be.
But I think the majority of people
have reached the point where they are going to do anything
they have to in order to be able to continue striking and making that point.
The fact that people are still willing to fight
tells me that people have hope that things will get better.