In the emergency department, and on my wards, the strikes sit lightly. My specialty of internal medicine never closes; Easter Monday was a normal working day. The only difference from today until Monday next is that junior doctors will be scarce.

Not terribly scarce, in truth, since many are as disenchanted with the strikes as you might hope. They prefer work to the picket lines. Yet lots are aggrieved by how far their pay has fallen below what they feel they deserve. Many more are furious that their training posts have been awarded wholesale to foreign applicants with no obvious superior merit. If I have worked with any junior in the past year who is enthused about these strikes, they have kept it to themselves – and the young are seldom shy of a grievance. 

The strikes are needless on both sides, but continue all the same, to everybody’s cost

The strikes are needless on both sides, but continue all the same, to everybody’s cost

The casualties are real, but invisible from where we work. Clinics and surgeries and elective services have been cancelled, at a human cost of needless pain and, surely, some deaths. Then there is the cost to the NHS of employing an old fool like myself to........

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