Wes Streeting, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, said:
I want to personally thank all the NHS staff who once again worked round the clock during the BMA’s latest round of strikes to keep the show on the road.
One of the things I am proud of is during previous rounds of resident doctors strikes we’ve maintained 95% of planned care, improvements in A&E and emergency response times. However, I wish we were not putting so much on the shoulders of other NHS staff or spending £300 million on this strike.
That money would have been better spent implementing this offer to improve resident doctors’ pay and career opportunities.
Resident doctors had a 28.9% pay rise in the first weeks of this government. There’s a deal on the table for an average 4.9% pay rise for this year which increases to 7.1% for some of the lowest paid doctors.
We have also prioritised UK graduates for training places and that’s reduced competition for those places from four to one to less than two to one.
My door is open - as it always has been. I am asking the resident doctors’ committee to meet me so we can resolve this dispute and put an end to these needless cycles of disruption.