{"id":269572,"date":"2025-11-18T11:31:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T11:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/269572\/"},"modified":"2025-11-18T11:31:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T11:31:08","slug":"im-a-resident-doctor-on-strike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/269572\/","title":{"rendered":"I’m a resident doctor on strike"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t\t\t\t\tDr Andrew Myerson, an A&E doctor in London, explains why he has joined the resident doctor strikes this week\t\t\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve 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\u2019s One Big Beautiful Bill Act removed these subsidies, with costs skyrocketing as a result.)<\/p>\n

Since I came to the UK 10 years ago, I\u2019ve also watched the gradual destruction of the NHS, which was then regarded as the number one healthcare system in the entire world. It\u2019s been heartbreaking to watch.<\/p>\n

If you look at our waiting lists from 2010 to now, it\u2019s shocking how much they\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

\"Dr\u2018Nobody comes here to make money. I could earn four times as much back in the US\u2019 \u2013 Dr Andrew Meyerson is an A&E doctor in the NHS (Photo: Handout\/Andrew Meyerson)<\/p>\n

We\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why I fight for my patients. The Hippocratic Oath means that our job is to \u201cdo no harm\u201d. Day after day, when I see A&E patients who are waiting for 12 hours or suffering because they cannot get a GP appointment \u2013 that\u2019s not because of what health professionals are doing in hospitals. That\u2019s the result of decisions made by politicians in Westminster.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Nobody comes here to make money. I could earn four times as much back in the US.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s simply not the will among the politicians.<\/p>\n

This is the 13th time that we\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

People say, \u201cOh, you are greedy for doing this. You\u2019re causing patient harm; you\u2019re wasting NHS money.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The second issue is the worrying development that newly qualified F2 doctors are unable to get jobs<\/a>. 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

We should be doing everything possible, especially at this point in history, to ensure we have no doctor or nurse unemployment, where we say, \u201clet\u2019s flood the NHS with as many people as can help, because this is a crisis\u201d. <\/p>\n

Because whenever a patient waits longer than four hours in A&E, they come to harm. When a patient doesn\u2019t get their cancer care soon enough, they can come to harm. If they\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

After seeing what politicians have done in my own country, back in the US, and here, I\u2019m filled with rage, but it motivates me. That\u2019s why we need to fight. If we don\u2019t, then patients won\u2019t be able to see a doctor in the future \u2013 and AI is not going to solve that.<\/p>\n

\t\tYour next read<\/p>\n


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