Published 2nd December 2025

The announcement of a five-day resident doctors’ strike, this time running straight into Christmas, is a devastating blow to patients trapped in a fight they didn’t start and cannot end. At this stage, we risk normalising strike action as part of the standard patient experience. Announcing a strike in the run-up to Christmas feels like a betrayal of the trust patients place in the NHS to be there when they need it.

Each time strike action happens we hear from patients of the devastating impact on their mental and physical health. One patient told us, “the strikes have increased [my] anxiety as my care has been delayed several times, and the pain is increasing.” Another described that while in A&E they were only seen once by a doctor after having been left alone in a cubicle for seven hours. These are not isolated stories, they are indicative of the lived reality for thousands of patients while they wait, not just for treatment but for resolution to this ongoing dispute.

The NHS is at the beginning of an exceptionally difficult winter with record flu admissions, increased A&E attendances, and now fresh industrial action. But the truth is that ‘winter pressures’ no longer arrive with the cold weather; they are the year-round baseline patients and staff are already struggling under. Long waits, care in corridors and limited access to services have become the everyday reality. Winter doesn’t cause the NHS crisis, it exposes it.

And this is precisely why choosing to strike in the final days before Christmas, when the system is already stretched to breaking point, will land so heavily on patients. At a moment when people most need to trust that the NHS will hold steady through the busiest weeks of the year, this announcement risks further eroding that trust and deepening the sense of abandonment many already feel.

Patients have waited long enough. They have endured repeated failed negotiations. Endured the announcement and reannouncement of strike dates. But their endurance has its limits, and it is beyond unreasonable to ask patients for more.

We urge the BMA leadership and individual resident doctors to take a cold, hard look at the impact on patients of another strike at this time. We understand the impossible position doctors find themselves in, torn between their duty to patients and their employment dispute, but this is now the second round of strike action in weeks. We ask, is there no other way?

We are now calling unequivocally for immediate independent arbitration to begin now, not after the strike but instead of it. This cycle must end.

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