This week, after three days of strikes before Christmas, junior doctors resumed their action with six days of consecutive strikes – the longest strike in NHS history.

Make no mistake, these strikes have a profound impact on patients, and on efforts to clear the NHS backlog after covid. The three days of strikes before Christmas alone meant 86,329 inpatient and outpatient appointments had to be rescheduled, including 280 appointments at our acute hospitals in Shrewsbury and Telford, where some 500 shifts were missed due to strike action.

These latest strikes come at a time when the NHS is under intense seasonal pressure, including the impact of covid and flu, as well as normal staff absences through sickness.

For 2023-24, the Government accepted the independent pay review bodies’ pay recommendations in full, recognising the vital contribution that NHS staff make to our country. 

Despite offering junior doctors a further pay uplift of 3%, on top of the average 8.8% pay rise (10.3% for lowest paid doctors) paid from April, the BMA's Junior Doctors committee has decided to reject this, and instead put its members and the public through an unprecedented level of strike action. The BMA is calling for a 35% pay rise for junior doctors. The government has already reached deals with nurses and ambulance staff, as well as with representatives of hospital Consultants and Specialty & Specialist Doctors - both of whom have called off strike action while consulting their members.

Just before Christmas, I launched a new online survey with my successor as Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate for South Shropshire, Stuart Anderson. We want to gain real insight into what local residents here in South Shropshire actually think about the respective approaches of the BMA and the government to this dispute.

Within 24 hours of being posted online, our survey was shared among a doctors’ community forum on the social media platform Reddit, encouraging people in unflattering terms to fill in the survey. Viewers on Reddit were provided with two addresses within the Ludlow Constituency, which if used would give the impression of feedback from local residents. By earlier this week some 54% of all survey responses had come from either of these addresses provided on Reddit or addresses outside the Ludlow Constituency. 

It is frankly quite easy to see through this clumsy attempt to prejudice the results of our survey. But it is nonetheless both disappointing and revealing that some should feel the need to skew the outcome. 

Our survey remains open, so I encourage as many readers as possible who actually live  in South Shropshire to go to www.tellphilip.com to let us know your views.