Stop calling us ‘junior’, demand doctors

Junior doctors made headlines this week after they begrudgingly accepted the government’s pay deal. Two thirds of British Medical Association (BMA) members voted in favour of Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s offer, meaning medics across England will see a 22.3 per cent rise consolidated into their pay. Yet the move hasn’t entirely eased tensions between junior doctors and the government, with co-chair of the BMA Dr Vivek Trivedi insisting that medics will still ‘expect pay uplifts each and every year’. The co-chair of the doctors’ union went on to warn Streeting that wage increases must ‘occur in a timely fashion and at the pace that our members have asked for’ – otherwise, as Kate Andrews wrote, medics will consider striking again.

But the very latest issue plaguing medics across the country is one not of salary, but of semantics. Throughout the pay negotiation process – and long before the strikes – there have existed rumblings of discontent among medics about the label ‘junior doctors’.