Cost of covering just one striking junior doctor hits £100,000

The cost of covering just one striking junior doctor has hit about £100,000 as strike action enters its 16th month.

The doctors’ union recommends consultants charge up to £269 an hour to take on “non-contractual” work, which includes covering junior doctors on strike, even if they work in the same department.

The British Medical Association’s (BMA) rate card advises doctors on the minimum they should charge hospitals for extra shifts, ranging from £161 an hour to £269 for night shifts, about three times their usual pay.

Junior doctors end their 44th day striking since last March at 7am on Tuesday, just two days before the general election.

It would have cost a hospital an extra £94,688 to cover 44 eight-hour shifts at an hourly rate of £269 per hour, and three times as much to cover multiple medics working over the whole 24-hour period.

Even at the lower end of the recommended rate, it would have cost hospitals £56,672 per striking doctor.

About 25,000 junior doctors have routinely taken to the picket line during the 11 rounds of action.

Not all hospitals have agreed to pay the BMA’s premium rates, which are agreed locally, but some hospitals have been forced to pay even higher rates because of a lack of alternative options.

One consultant in Plymouth was paid more than £3,000 for a 12-and-a-half-hour shift last year. Some hospitals are believed to have paid at least £6,000 for a shift.

The NHS has said the total cost of strikes has topped £3 billion, through a mixture of covering doctors’ shifts and rearranging the 1.4 million cancelled appointments and operations.

Consultants themselves received a pay rise after striking, with the Government giving them an uplift of up to £20,000 for the 2023-24 financial year, taking the most senior doctors’ base salary to almost £132,000.

As well as overtime and extra shifts such as covering junior doctor strikes, the most senior consultants can have NHS pensions worth about £100,000 per year.

Wes Streeting, Labour’s health spokesman, has suggested that overtime rates should be capped at time and a half.

Under Labour’s plans to put on 40,000 extra appointments during the evenings and weekends to tackle the 7.6 million waiting list, hospitals are set to receive £1.1 billion in additional funding.

This is intended to pay staff for working extra shifts and clear the backlog, and while the rates paid will still be agreed locally, Mr Streeting has said doctors should get the standard time and a half rate afforded to other staff such as nurses.

Mr Streeting and Sir Keir Starmer have both said ending junior doctor strikes would be a priority should they win the general election, and have committed to getting around the table with the BMA on “day one”.

The BMA’s junior doctors’ committee said they were hopeful of thrashing out a deal with Mr Streeting, who has said pay restoration for the profession will be a “journey not an event”.

They have asked for a 35 per cent pay rise over multiple years and are also seeking improvements to issues such as rotational training, which sees them moved around the country at short notice.

The doctors in training are also able to charge premium rates for doing extra work, with the BMA recommending rates of up to £159 an hour for the most experienced junior doctors covering night shifts.