By Dr Rhiannon Mihranian Osborne

People across the country share the experience of sitting for hours in A&E, struggling to get a GP appointment, or spending months on a waiting list.

What many don’t know is that on the other side, resident doctors spend hours working flat out with minimum staffing, months looking for permanent work, and years trying to get into specialist training, often moving multiple times across the country to get a job.

The NHS is in a staffing crisis, driven by multiple factors, and two of them are what doctors are striking over today - pay and jobs, in particular the number of specialist trainee posts the government funds.

Most of us just want to be in well-staffed, secure work, with opportunities for progression, where we can provide quality, caring medicine. Workers and patients both deserve that.

The pay ask from the British Medical Association is a commitment to eventually restoring our pay to pre-austerity levels (2008). This is a demand other workers can and should be asking for.

Wage suppression across the public and private sector over the last decade has massively reduced real terms income for the majority of people, whilst the richest in the country are raking in more and more through both income and wealth.

It’s not only doctors struggling with pay and........

© LBC