u/Doctors-VoteUK

Elections for the Resident Doctors Committee are now open! 

Find your DoctorsVote endorsed candidates here: DoctorsVote endorsed candidates

Four years ago, DoctorsVote empowered the subreddit to awaken a sleeping union. Together, we delivered 4 strike mandates and 12 rounds of industrial action over 3 years. We produced the first document regulating the scope of PAs in the workplace protecting your training opportunities and careers. We delivered contract reform on exception reporting and were the ones to action UK Graduate Prioritisation.

With your help, we made doctors believe in the BMA again.

The hard work of committed reps was taken for granted. Everyone claimed they could do what we did, they all claimed they wanted FPR. 

A year later the results speak for themselves.

The last 12 months were the first time since the start of the FPR campaign that your DoctorsVote reps weren’t in the driving seat.

Are you happy with how the past year has gone?

• FPR is a footnote - the thing we sacrificed our pay for, and voted for time and time again has been entirely sidelined by the BMA.
• We’ve settled for a deal that bakes in another real-terms pay cut, our union has rolled over for Labour.
• Action on PAs has come to a stand still and the BMA minces its words on ACPs to please the RCN. Momentum on regulating non-doctors has completely stalled.
• The BMA has fallen hook, line and sinker for vague promises on things like exam fee reimbursements, portfolio fees and LED contract protections are riddled with loopholes and get out clauses. Doctors are beginning to ask when all these grand promises will materialise. And yet the RDC leadership has gone completely silent on delivering on these “wins”.

The RDC leadership have not held a meeting of the committee since their offer passed to answer any of your questions. We need a BMA that can deliver on the changes set out in the offer and to get us ready to strike again if the Government fails to live up to its promises. 

Do you trust the BMA leadership to deliver this?

The referendum on this ballot is now history. Whether you voted yes, no, or not at all, now is the time to reunify the profession.

Full pay restoration can still be won.

If you want FPR and a union that hold Labour to account, then you need to elect the representatives who are willing to put the profession ahead of themselves.

You’ve now seen what happens when the BMA is left to its own devices.

🦀 You can check you DoctorsVote endorsed candidates here: DoctorsVote endorsed candidates

🗳️ VOTE here: Vote in the RDC elections

From 18th-26th June, you’ll be voting on the offer your strikes were called off for.

Many of you have already realised it’s not worth the paper it’s written on. Here are the lowlights:

🚫 0% uplift for thousands of doctors

📝 The deal ties us to accepting the DDRB or we lose what little is on offer if we strike.

👎 Token exam refunds, which only strengthen the Government's control over Royal Colleges.

♻️ Recycled ‘new’ jobs with no net increase, doing nothing to fix the unemployment crisis.

🚮 An offer littered with get-out clauses and empty promises such as ‘should’, ‘expected,’ and ‘where possible’

⬇️ Your pay now tied to ‘productivity’ - if your employer doesn’t think you’re working hard enough, your pay doesn’t increase.

⏱️ No recourse to strike during the implementation period without breaking and nullifying the deal - with no fixed deadlines, the Government will be able to unilaterally pull the rug on us.

🤏 Institutional vague-posting of ‘rises’ that include money you’ve already been given by the DDRB. In reality this deal amounts to an average of a paltry *1.55% per year* over the next two years

🍾 A massive post CCT bottleneck, forcing you to remain a registrar forever.

This is nearly the same deal that was resoundingly rejected in March. It wasn't right then, and you shouldn’t settle for it now.

How to reject this offer and fight for something better:

📩 Look out for an email from Civica on 18th June

📝 If you don’t receive it, email doctorspay@bma.org.uk to request one.

❌ Vote NO in the referendum from 18th-26th June

🪧 Get ready to strike harder for the deal you deserve

​

The BMA has released updated graphs on pay which demonstrate what everyone on Reddit has known for a while now - the current strategy isn’t working.

Progress towards FPR has flatlined since the 2025/2026 pay award. See how much progress towards FPR has been made yourself. This should put to rest the argument that any party is our friend.

Your DoctorsVote reps immediately balloted for strike action after the insulting 2025/2026 pay award. This dispute remains open. The current officers have not outlined a credible strategy on how they plan on tackling this as well as the equally insulting 2026/27 pay award. We must not let the Government off the hook.

Our response to this contempt should be stronger strike action to sharpen the minds of ministers. Instead the officers have announced a shorter period of strikes, well in advance of the notice period required (10 days), and which ends on a Friday which means work will be deferred to fall on returning residents who are on bare bones weekend staffing. Not only this, but the current dates leave out weekends which are key to any strategy. These strikes have been inherently easier for employers and Government to plan around, potentially limiting the pressure generated by the upcoming round of industrial action.

The one thing that has stood out this year has been your consistency of participation in strikes. Whilst the BMA and political activists might have given up on FPR, you have not. Despite repeated predictions of falling engagement, participation in industrial action has remained resilient.

Trusts are once again making threats regarding progression and ARCP sign off. This tactic is rolled out every June. They fail to recognise that the training pathway they have created is so threadbare that they cannot maintain a system that holds back thousands of doctors. ARCP for everyone but FY1 is competency, not time based, so please ensure that your portfolios are as complete as possible. For FY1s, quite frankly they know that they cannot run departments if they hold you back.

Over the past fortnight we have been entertained by a new clown in the anti-FPR circus: DoctorsForJobs. This account recycles the Government's tired arguments. Please remember to address the falsehoods accounts like this spread.

The argument that we should stop striking to focus on other issues is naive. The issues that face us today, doctor substitution, job insecurity, proliferated during a time the BMA was weak. Fair pay and tackling doctor substitution are not mutually exclusive. They are heavily intertwined. Years of silence from the BMA led directly to this. Do not be fooled into thinking stopping strikes will suddenly make the BMA address anything else, this has abjectly failed to happen in the past. The Government is forced to hear us on all issues when we show we are strong by striking for pay.

Achieving full pay restoration requires sufficient leverage to bring the Government back to meaningful negotiations. The threat of strikes is empty without real sustained action.

We support a call to extend the strikes so that they end on 06:59 22nd of June.

We have already seen the power of the subreddit move the officers to announcing strikes. It’s time for you to make it clear that 4 days of strikes with 19 days notice is not good enough. It is not fair to your colleagues picking up the slack the weekend they return.

Support the call for adding on a weekend of strikes.

It is not good enough for the subreddit to continuously drag the officers into taking a stronger strike position or remind them we are fighting for FPR. If you want to get involved in getting the RDC back on track next year please email DoctorsVoteUK@gmail.com

It’s time we made FPR our number one priority, only you can do that by voting for DoctorsVote in August.

Within 24 hours over 1000 of you have signed the open letter to call for strikes immediately.

You have shown that you are as committed as ever to FPR, you are committed to strike action, and you will no longer allow yourselves to be played.

Jack has until 4pm today to respect the wishes of doctors and finally call strikes. We will not win FPR by sitting on the sidelines hoping we make a good first impression on the new health secretary.

The only language politicians understand is strength. Let's welcome the new health secretary, and whoever wants to take over no 10 with the strongest message of intent. Doctors will strike, and will continue to do so until our value is recognised and politicians return what they have taken from us: our pay and our profession.

DoctorsVote

👉 Sign the open letter here

Dear Jack,

It has become apparent that Wes Streeting has outmanoeuvred you. For anyone paying attention, it has been entirely predictable that he wanted to avoid strikes so that he could make a run for Prime Minister. This was expected of Streeting. Instead of exerting leverage on him by announcing strikes, you have forced us to dance to his tune, wasting our mandate in the process. We could have used his desperation to be Prime Minister to the advantage of doctors. Instead, as one of your officers publicly stated: “there is no intention to go on strike”. 

Strikes should have been called in the weeks ahead of local elections. Starmer would have likely moved to avoid any more damage than was already coming his way. You refused. 

Strikes should have been called earlier this week when it was clear that Streeting would be unlikely to be able to secure a larger pay envelope from Starmer and Reeves. You still refused. 

Now is the time to show the public what a failure Streeting has been as a health minister, but we can’t take advantage of this moment in the media and on the picket lines without announcing strikes. You are still refusing, hoping for a “friendlier” health minister. 

No health minister is ever going to be a friend to our profession, and it’s shocking to see you still think this way. We must play our hand now while it’s strong, and show any incoming minister that doctors will not back down or be strung along. 

We are asking all resident doctors in England who want further strikes to support this open letter (names will be anonymised). 

In particular, we ask that members of the UKRDC specifically support this open letter, and call on Jack to announce strike action or join his friend Wes Streeting and step aside.

👉 Sign the open letter here

Edit 15/05/26: Within less than 24 hours over 1000 of you have signed the open letter which we have now sent to Jack: https://www.reddit.com/r/doctorsUK/comments/1tdr30a/doctorsvote_for_strikes/

We want to start with thanks to everyone who voted for DoctorsVote candidates. The movement entirely relies on your votes, hence the name.

Thanks to your votes, DoctorsVote has secured 10 seats on UK Council, the most of any of the formal slates. Of the 59 other seats, there are a mix of people, some ran with formal slates, others with informal factions; and among there are those willing to work together on various issues. We also wish to thank all 248 candidates who put themselves forward and every doctor who took the time to vote in this important election.

There has been a massive turnover of elected members of Council. Only 18 of 69 will be returning as voting members.

Disappointingly, only 5.3% of members voted, down from 7.1% at the last election. This should be a warning to everyone in the BMA. It reflects the practical difficulty of engaging doctors in internal elections, but also a much deeper problem: many doctors either no longer see the point of the BMA, or don't believe it is capable of delivering meaningful change.

Full pay restoration has been put on the backburner. There is little information on how negotiations are progressing. The Labour government is being allowed to drag out the process with little political consequence. Strikes have lacked the consistency and momentum needed to keep doctors engaged. With local elections around the corner, we should have been out on the picket lines, making visible the harm done by Streeting to the health service by cutting 1,000 consultant and GP training posts out of spite. Communications have been both lacking and mixed. Early in the pay campaign, we produced graphics that cut through to mainstream media and highlighted the erosion of our pay. Nothing since has had the same impact.

On UK graduate prioritisation: emergency legislation was delivered, but there is nothing to guarantee it is permanent, it has been negotiated so poorly that it hands all power to Streeting. It will require your constant vigilance to ensure that UK graduate priorisation is not watered down, or that UK Council campaign against the legislation. We cannot have a repeat of past failures where certain senior leaders have used their position to push ideological beliefs rather than outcomes for members, for example by trying to contain action on UK graduate prioritisation rather than support it.

The link between turnout and the BMA delivering results is not abstract. In the UKRDC elections, when DoctorsVote had a landslide victory, ten times the number of people voted compared to the year before. Five minutes of your time could change the course of your working life.

Where do we go from here?

The next three years will be demanding.

We are refocusing on the pay campaign. We will create an environment to support action, including strikes where necessary, to achieve full pay and professional restoration.

We had a manifesto and we intend to deliver as much of it as possible from the platform we stood on. We do not have the numbers to guarantee every change we want to see, but we will work with those on Council who share our aims.

We will continue to create an environment to support action (including strikes where necessary) to achieve full pay restoration and full professional restoration. That means not only fighting for doctors’ pay, but also for the conditions that allow doctors to train, progress and practise properly: adequate training numbers, appropriate educational opportunities, meaningful post-CCT employment prospects, and protection of medical roles from poorly planned or indiscriminate expansion of non-doctor substitute professions.

That also means pushing for financial responsibility and proper accountability within the BMA. Members pay substantial fees, and the answer to every financial pressure cannot simply be to raise subscriptions further. The BMA must show careful stewardship of your money, with a stringent approach to waste and inefficient internal processes. We will also press the Chief Officers and the wider Board of Directors, for a resolution to the internal staff pay dispute, so that the BMA can return to delivering the level of timely employment advice, workplace support, and member service that doctors rightly expect in return for a £400+ annual membership fee.

The Board of Directors, chief officers and wider management structures must be properly accountable to members.

None of this is possible without people stepping in to help. Every single change we have made was because people decided to take action and put in the hours, rather than making comments from the sidelines. We are all full-time doctors first. We are here to deliver for you. We aren't interested in shirking our day job to play politician at BMA House, unlike some BMA lifers working just a few clinical days a month.

We work in the BMA as it remains the best tool doctors have to improve our pay, conditions and professional future. But a tool only works if it is kept sharp. If we do not hone it, by making it more focused, accountable, responsive and effective, it risks becoming a dull and pointless instrument: expensive to maintain, but increasingly unable to cut through the problems doctors face.

Our aim is a BMA that is disciplined, effective and unafraid to act. One that commands respect from government, employers and NHS managers. One that uses debate to drive action, rather than letting internal processes become a substitute for delivery.

We are the people who consistently put pragmatism and doctors above all else. That will not change. If you want to see real change in your working life, in your pay, in your profession - get involved. Volunteer, stand for election, spread the word, and when the next ballot lands in your inbox, return it. We will keep fighting for a doctors first union. We are most effective when doctors vote.