Planned walkout cancelled before Monday start, averting week-long disruption

Resident doctors in England called off a four-day strike just hours before it was due to begin, after the government put forward a new offer on pay, jobs and progression. The walkout had been scheduled to start at 7am on Monday, 15 June, and run until 6.59am on Friday, 19 June, a move that would have forced hospitals into another week of cancelled appointments and operations.

The new package is broader than a simple wage adjustment. Government papers say it includes a reform of resident doctor pay through nodal point changes, reimbursement of the first two mandatory royal college exam fees from April 2026, and measures to improve access to specialty training places. It also includes contractual standardisation for locally employed doctors, deanery reform, and a new industrial relations committee to oversee delivery. In the government’s earlier outline of the deal, the plan was to add at least 1,000 specialty training posts this year and between 4,000 and 4,500 over three years, with the reforms intended to ease the jobs bottleneck that has fed the dispute.

The British Medical Association said the new offer would be put to members, but the dispute is far from settled. Dr Jack Fletcher, chair of the resident doctors committee, said, “This should not have been left to the last moment,” and said tens of thousands of frontline doctors would now vote on whether the package was enough. The union has argued that resident doctors’ pay remains too far behind and that shortages in training places are pushing doctors away from the NHS, even after repeated strikes through 2025 and another round planned for June.

For ministers, the cancellation avoided immediate disruption but also underscored how fragile the settlement remains. Health Secretary James Murray welcomed the move and said the government could not afford to raise this year’s pay offer further after a 28.9% rise in resident doctor pay over the past three years. That line now meets a political reality: the system escaped a week of strain, but the underlying fight over pay, staffing and the future supply of doctors is still being decided.