Health secretary Victoria Atkins sparked outraged after she appeared to have a dig at junior doctors – saying she liked to call them “doctors in training”.
The Tory cabinet minister dangled the prospected of an improved offer on pay and conditions on the second day of junior doctors’ 72-hour strike.
But Ms Atkins was accused of “insulting” junior doctors by using her own special term for the group while speaking about pay deals agreed with other health service workers.
“The last cohort is junior doctors – or doctors in training, as I prefer to call them – and they, sadly to my great disappointment, walked out of our negotiations and then called these strikes.”
Labour MP Chris Bryant immediately fired back at the health secretary on X: “They’re doctors. Doctors. Not doctors in training.”
While junior doctors do receive some clinical training while in the job, they are qualified doctors and Ms Atkins’ term “doctors in training” is not one used in the NHS.
Ms Atkins also sought to highlight splits between junior doctors’ leaders in the British Medical Association (BMA) and other NHS staff – claiming some were “deeply uncomfortable” with the industrial action over Christmas.
But the health secretary hinted that an improved offer on pay and conditions could be on the table if the junior doctors called off the industrial action.
She told BBC Breakfast that health department ministers and officials would be “back round the table in 20 minutes” for talks if the strikes are called off “and then we can see how much further we can go”.
A 72-hour England-wide walkout, which began at 7am on 20 December and will run until Saturday, comes as the NHS grapples with one of its toughest winters on record. It will be followed by a six-day walkout from 3 January.
The NHS has said emergency and urgent care will be prioritised during the strikes over Christmas and New Year and that “almost all” routine care will be affected.
More than 300,000 operations and appointments are reportedly set to be cancelled during the strikes. It could push NHS waiting lists, currently at 7.7 million, above eight million for the first time ever, according to analysis by The Times.
Hospital leaders have described the walkouts as their “worst fears realised” as they grapple with a rising number of people needing help with winter viruses, particularly norovirus.
Ms Atkins told BBC Radio 4’s Today there will be “many, many doctors listening to this who feel deeply uncomfortable that their committee has called these strikes at this time”.
She said consultants, nurses and other doctors would be coming in to do extra shifts. “They are being expected by the junior doctors’ committee to pick up the slack of their strikes,” she added.
“After the three Christmases that our medical profession has seen with Covid, I think we all wanted this Christmas to be as calm and settled as possible. Instead, this strike action is just striking through that.”
The BMA’s junior doctors’ committee has challenged the government to make an offer first, so strikes could be cancelled.
It said the offer from the government, an average 3 per cent rise from January – on top of the average of nearly 9 per cent recommended by the independent pay review body in April – was not enough to make up for below-inflation pay rises since 2008.
It has asked for a full pay restoration that the government said would amount to a 35 per cent pay rise, which ministers have said is unaffordable. Conciliation service Acas said it is “ready to help” resolve the dispute.
Elsewhere, Ms Atkins has written to the bodies which recommend salary uplifts for NHS staff to ask them to begin looking at the pay round for 2024/25 – but unions warned she had left it too late.