Dr Andrew Myerson, an A&E doctor in London, explains why he has joined the resident doctor strikes this week
Dr Andrew Meyerson, 43, moved from the US to the UK in 2015 to study medicine. He qualified shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic. He now works as an A&E doctor in London, and is on strike over pay and a shortage of jobs for newly qualified doctors.
I’ve seen politicians in my home country actively destroy public healthcare for working people. Donald Trump just took away healthcare access for 20 million people. (This is the amount of people who bought their health insurance through the Affordable Care Act which subsidised and therefore lowered the cost of premiums. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act removed these subsidies, with costs skyrocketing as a result.)
Since I came to the UK 10 years ago, I’ve also watched the gradual destruction of the NHS, which was then regarded as the number one healthcare system in the entire world. It’s been heartbreaking to watch.
If you look at our waiting lists from 2010 to now, it’s shocking how much they’ve risen. Look at every metric of the NHS and you will see how successive governments intentionally underfunded and undermined the system and actively sought to suppress when workers go on strike.
‘Nobody comes here to make money. I could earn four times as much back in the US’ – Dr Andrew Meyerson is an A&E doctor in the NHS (Photo: Handout/Andrew Meyerson)
We’re left on the front line watching our patients suffer on the worst waiting lists in NHS history, with the worst A&E and GP waiting times, and the worst cancer care.
That’s why I fight for my patients. The Hippocratic Oath means that our job is to “do no harm”. Day after day, when I see A&E patients who are waiting for 12 hours or suffering because they cannot get a GP appointment – that’s not because of what health professionals are doing in hospitals. That’s the result of decisions made by politicians in Westminster.
When I worked in Worcester after I graduated, there was a queue of 30 ambulances waiting to unload patients. A patient died because they couldn’t get inside fast enough. That sort of thing eats away at you. It impairs your ability to deliver high-quality care because you feel so burdened. All medics signed up to learn how to help people because it was what we were called to do, especially working in the NHS.
Nobody comes here to make money. I could earn four times as much back in the US.
We know that we could transform patient care if we had more doctors, more nurses, more hospital beds and a government that cared about solving social care problems. If we did that and restored the funding that was stolen from the NHS budgets over the last 15 years, it would make a huge difference but there’s simply not the will among the politicians.
This is the 13th time that we’ve been on strike. Restoring our pay to what it was in 2008 has been our chief demand. Despite many other professions getting back to those levels, the most significant drop in pay was to resident, formerly junior, doctors, and we have not seen a return to those levels.
People say, “Oh, you are greedy for doing this. You’re causing patient harm; you’re wasting NHS money.”
The number of doctors leaving the NHS to work abroad has risen by 1,000 a year since 2016. We are inundated on social media with adverts from healthcare bodies to lure us abroad, because they know that working conditions here are terrible. Pay restoration is an essential component of stopping that staff haemorrhage.
The second issue is the worrying development that newly qualified F2 doctors are unable to get jobs. These are people who know about the struggles in the NHS, yet still decide to train here and to serve the people in their communities. And I understand that there’s no guarantee that you will have a job afterwards in any other sector. However, this is a publicly funded and run healthcare system. It has always needed government officials to plan for its smooth running.
We should be doing everything possible, especially at this point in history, to ensure we have no doctor or nurse unemployment, where we say, “let’s flood the NHS with as many people as can help, because this is a crisis”.
Because whenever a patient waits longer than four hours in A&E, they come to harm. When a patient doesn’t get their cancer care soon enough, they can come to harm. If they’re not seen by their GP soon enough, they can come to harm, and all the costs get worse as they need a higher level of care to move on through the system.
After seeing what politicians have done in my own country, back in the US, and here, I’m filled with rage, but it motivates me. That’s why we need to fight. If we don’t, then patients won’t be able to see a doctor in the future – and AI is not going to solve that.
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