I'm a striking doctor. We're fighting for the health and soul of the nation

What many don’t know is that on the other side, resident doctors spend hours working flat out with minimum staffing, months looking for permanent work, and years trying to get into specialist training, often moving multiple times across the country to get a job.

The NHS is in a staffing crisis, driven by multiple factors, and two of them are what doctors are striking over today - pay and jobs, in particular the number of specialist trainee posts the government funds.

Most of us just want to be in well-staffed, secure work, with opportunities for progression, where we can provide quality, caring medicine. Workers and patients both deserve that.

The pay ask from the British Medical Association is a commitment to eventually restoring our pay to pre-austerity levels (2008). This is a demand other workers can and should be asking for.

Wage suppression across the public and private sector over the last decade has massively reduced real terms income for the majority of people, whilst the richest in the country are raking in more and more through both income and wealth.

It’s not only doctors struggling with pay and staffing. Streeting just announced a 50% cut in NHS ICB staff, who do important work managing services. Nursing numbers have dropped since funded tuition for nursing college was removed in 2017, and punitive immigration changes will push out even more staff.

This month, 300 health workers in Manchester are at risk of losing their jobs and even being deported because of sudden changes to visa rules.

Importantly, the NHS cannot be viewed in isolation. Every day, I see patients with health problems that are caused or worsened by social inequality.

Labour’s failure to invest in social housing, their commitment to keeping the two-child benefit cap, and cruel cuts to disability support all cause sickness, and the NHS is one of the few remaining sources of support for the poorest in the country.

Instead of holistic analysis, Wes Streeting is looking for shortcuts. His NHS plan relies on the mystical promise of AI techno-fixes, rather than reversing years of inequality and austerity.

He claims the NHS budget needs cutbacks, but is happy to give millions of pounds to AI war-tech giant Palantir, whose founder claimed the NHS “makes people sick.”

Instead of making sure that a service that we all rely on has the core resources it needs to provide lifesaving care, he's funding a CIA-backed surveillance firm to hold our health data.

Streeting also promotes using the costly and inefficient private sector to cut waiting times, which is convenient given he has taken over £58,000 in donations from private health actors.

Continued austerity is always a political choice, so don't let them tell you there isn’t the money. A 2 per cent tax on wealth over £10 million would raise £24 billion a year. Doctors’ strikes won’t fix everything, but they are part of a much bigger fight for health.

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Dr Rhiannon Mihranian Osborne is a resident doctor, researcher on corporate power, and community organiser.

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