Tens of thousands of doctors will strike between 07:00 BST on Tuesday until just before 07:00 on Monday 13 April. <\/p>\n
Health Secretary Wes Streeting said the strikes were “disappointing” and that the focus was now on protecting patients and staff by minimising disruption to the health service.<\/p>\n
He maintained that the NHS delivered almost 95% of planned activity during the resident doctor strikes in December.<\/p>\n
The doctors’ union, the British Medical Association (BMA), said the strikes “would bring disruption – despite NHS England’s assurances that it can maintain the vast majority of services running for patients during times of industrial action”. <\/p>\n
Dr Jack Fletcher, chairman of the BMA’s resident doctors committee, said: “Many senior doctors will be covering for us and whilst that of course benefits patients, we know they are also exhausted and as demoralised as we are.”<\/p>\n
Prof Ramani Moonesinghe, national clinical director for critical and perioperative care at NHS England, said there were “tried and tested systems for making sure that we can keep all of our health services safe over industrial action”.<\/p>\n
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The NHS is still open for business and there are still plenty of people there available to care for you. <\/p>\n
“If you have a planned appointment – unless you have been specifically told that it has been postponed or cancelled – you should attend for that as you’d expect to. <\/p>\n
“If you have an emergency or urgent condition, you should do exactly the things you’d normally do – so phone 111 or 999 if you need that sort of emergency care, attend A&E if you need emergency care or attend your GP or a local pharmacy if you have a less urgent condition.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tens of thousands of doctors will strike between 07:00 BST on Tuesday until just before 07:00 on Monday…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":515836,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[102,2960,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-515835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515835\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/515836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}