A demonstration thought to be attended by around 16,000 members of the medical community and its supporters took place in London on Saturday to protest against a new junior doctors' contract proposed by Jeremy Hunt.
The contract proposed by the health secretary would see "sociable working hours", for which junior doctors are paid a standard rate, change from 7am–7pm Monday–Friday to 7am–10pm Monday–Saturday. It would also remove incremental pay rises, with increases instead based on moving through the stages of training and taking on more responsibility. Doctors have said the new contract also removes safeguards that mean hospitals can be penalised for overworking juniors.
Ahead of Saturday's protest, the chair of the British Medical Association's junior doctors' committee, Dr Johann Malawana, told BuzzFeed News that the demonstration is "very much a reflection of the situation that they've put the professionals and the NHS in".
As I walk along I get to meet the amazing people that join us today to stand up for juniors #juniorcontract
"The outpouring of anger and frustration we have seen from thousands of junior doctors across the UK, culminating in today’s unprecedented gathering in London, must be a wake-up call for ministers," Malawana said in a statement.
"If they thought that junior doctors would simply accept their threats of imposition they have been proved very wrong," he added.
At King's College Hospital in south London, consultants worked unpaid on Saturday to allow junior doctors to attend the protest, a doctor specialising in anaesthesia said on Twitter.
Last month he said that "imposed #juniorcontract is unfair", calling on the government to "Negotiate, treat junior doctors fairly. Allow us to run a safe service."
I am delighted that my consultant colleagues are coming in on Saturday (unpaid) to allow our trainees to go to the #juniorcontract protests
Speaking to the crowd assembled in Waterloo Place as the protest began, 92-year-old NHS activist Harry Leslie Smith said the health service was "Britain's greatest achievement".
He described how his young sister died in a workhouse infirmary when he was a child because his mother couldn't afford healthcare, The Guardian reported.
The NHS, Smith said, "saved millions from the tyranny of sickness and poverty to move forward and lead productive lives.
"We must remember that the NHS is as central to our nation's wellbeing as the armed forces are to protect us from foreign threats."
He added that "if the government can sub large corporations and the wealthiest, they can afford the NHS".
When Jeremy Hunt blames the #BMA for the #juniorcontract imbroglio it shows this minister has neither honour or shame time for him to go
One of the protest's organisers, Dr Anna Warrington, told the Evening Standard that it "would be impossible for me to carry on training here in London" if the proposed contract went ahead.
Referring to worries that junior doctors could end up working an unsafe number of hours while facing a 15–20% pay cut, she said: "It's going back to the bad old days of hundred hour weeks when doctors just can't work safely."
Final-year medical student Heather Holyoak told BuzzFeed News that the mood at the protest was "electric and spilling over with frustration towards Jeremy Hunt".
Holyoak described hearing chants of "get Hunt out" and said that "every single person at the protest, whether they were doctors, medical students, nurses or members of the public, stands with the BMA and we will fight these proposals together."
The medical community is "stronger than ever", she said.
Many doctors feel that the change to pay structure would be particularly prohibitive to women, who make up the majority of the workforce.
Removal of incremental pay increases would impact on doctors' ability to progress through expensive training and lead to shortages in specialties, some fear.
"The proposed new model of tiered, incremental pay (three tiers throughout training) would mean that I would have no increase in pay for six years," Bernadette Lomas, a 34-year-old junior doctor training in anaesthesia, recently told BuzzFeed News.
Worse, she said, is that "progression through the tiers would depend on a review at the point that I complete a full-time equivalent year: If this fell outside the annual review period for trainees, I could be waiting more than six years."
Demonstrations also took place in Belfast and Nottingham, where thousands more doctors took to the streets to protest the contract.
Ahead of Saturday's protest, Hunt appeared on the BBC's Today programme to defend the contract, saying that the BMA had misled its members.
"I have made it absolutely clear that we don't want to reduce the to pay junior doctors," Hunt said.
"What we need to do is change the balance of pay between weekdays and weekends so that we don't force hospitals to roster three times less medical cover at weekends, leading to a 15% greater chance of dying if you're admitted at weekends.
"We are cutting one rate and increasing another rate [basic pay] to make sure that doctors don't lose out."
But junior doctors said that Hunt was "scaremongering". He is “ignoring the resounding voice of every professional in his field", Dr Osman Khalid told BuzzFeed News.
Dr Sundeep Grewal, who was instrumental in organising Saturday's demonstration, recently told BuzzFeed News that doctors would continue to protest until their voices were heard and a satisfactory agreement was reached.
"We will not go away until meaningful negotiations have happened and this is resolved," he said. "We're not going to stop."