The next government and junior doctors must “sit down and work it out” with a view to ending strikes, former doctor and author Adam Kay has urged.
Mr Kay, who turned his collection of diary entries during his medical training into bestselling book This Is Going To Hurt, which was later adapted into a TV miniseries, warned medics are leaving the UK for better prospects elsewhere.
“My support is is absolutely there for every single NHS worker to get fair pay,” he told the PA news agency.
“I particularly relate to the junior doctors. When I was working in the NHS as a junior doctor, I was earning over 30% more in real terms than doctors doing exactly the same job today.
“They’ve talked about pay equality or pay restoration rather than pay rise, because it just feels unfair on a basic level.
“If I go on Twitter, and I support the junior doctors, some Twitter contrarian will reply to say, ‘well, if you don’t like it, leave’, and that’s exactly the problem, because people are leaving.
“The NHS isn’t its buildings and its CT scanners and its bedpans, the NHS is the people who work there. And there will get a point where the NHS cannot function.
“I mean, hugely worrying numbers about the proportion of doctors who are intending to leave in the next 12 months – something has to change.”
The comments come as junior doctors in England prepare to go on strike.
Members of the British Medical Association (BMA) will walk out at 7am on June 27 until 7am on July 2, just days before the General Election.
Mr Kay called on the next government to sit down with unions and make an agreement to end the dispute.
He told PA: “Hopefully, the change of guards, which is almost inevitably coming in in the coming weeks, will understand that there is no way through other than coming to an agreement with the junior doctors, whatever that agreement looks like.
“There needs to be an agreement and both sides need to sit down and work it out.”
But he added that resolving strikes was just “part” of the work that needed to be done to resolve issues facing the health service.
“That’s important,” he said. “Particularly for my former colleagues working there.
“But I don’t think anyone can pretend that the NHS is in a good place at the moment. And I don’t think that the last 14 years have been good for the NHS.
“And so what we’re looking at at the moment is more promises. And so I don’t believe anything until I see it happen. But from my point of view, it can’t get any worse.”
It comes as Mr Kay backs a 10-year, £40 million programme to bolster innovation in the NHS.
The initiative, by NHS Charities Together, will initially invest in projects that aim to tackle health inequalities facing children and young people.
Mr Kay said: “If you’re born today in one postcode compared to another postcode, it has a huge impact on life expectancy.
“I think there’s a difference of 18 years between richest and poorest in terms of when your good health ends. And I just find that heart-breaking.
“It’s something that isn’t unique to this country and it’s not unique to this time, but everyone’s talked about forever and no-one has really got a handle on.”
He added: “Sadly, public health investment is one of the first things that goes when you’re tightening the belt. And it is the answer to keeping people out of primary and secondary care.”