This Easter, while families try to enjoy time together, the NHS is entering its 15th round of resident doctor industrial action since 2023. From 7am on Tuesday 7 April to 7am on Monday 13 April, junior doctors will be walking out again. The timing is deliberate. The impact will be real. And the government has no credible answer.

Fifteen Rounds. Still No Resolution.

Fifteen rounds of strikes. Read that again. This isn't a dispute that has been allowed to fester for a few weeks. This is a three-year-long failure of industrial relations management that has cost the NHS hundreds of thousands of cancelled appointments and operations, pushed waiting lists to catastrophic levels, and left patients without the care they need.

The NHS waiting list currently stands at 7.31 million cases — compared to 4.6 million before the pandemic. That's 2.7 million people who have been added to the queue since 2019. At the end of April, 19.9% of patients waiting for diagnostic tests had been waiting longer than six weeks. That is not a health service. That is a health crisis being managed by press release.

Labour Promised to Fix It. They Haven't.

Keir Starmer came to power promising to cut NHS waiting lists. It was one of his flagship commitments. Eighteen months into this government, the waiting list has barely moved in the right direction — and now we're heading into another Easter strike. Labour's approach has been to throw money at the NHS without demanding reform. The result is predictable: the same dysfunctional system, slightly better funded, still not working.

When I talk to people in Preston East about the NHS, the frustration is palpable. They can't get a GP appointment within a reasonable time. They're waiting months, sometimes over a year, for specialist referrals. They're told the NHS is underfunded — yet the UK spends more on health as a share of GDP than it ever has before. This is not primarily a funding crisis. It is a management and productivity crisis.

The Strike Tactic Isn't Working for Patients or Doctors

I have sympathy for the pressures junior doctors face. Long hours, poor pay relative to training costs, and a system that treats them as interchangeable resources rather than skilled professionals. But fifteen rounds of strikes have not fixed those problems. They have made the NHS worse for patients, eroded public goodwill towards striking medics, and created a blame game between government and unions that nobody is winning — except the lawyers and the union officials collecting their salaries throughout.

The NHS needs genuine reform. Not slogans. Not another round of pay talks that kick the can down the road. Real structural change that puts patients first and gives staff a system worth working in.

What Reform UK Would Do

Reform UK would tackle the NHS productivity crisis head-on. We'd end the bureaucratic bloat that sees billions spent on management layers that don't treat a single patient. We'd introduce genuine performance accountability so that trusts that consistently fail patients face real consequences. We'd reform the training pipeline for British doctors and nurses so we're not permanently dependent on recruiting from overseas. And we'd resolve the junior doctor dispute quickly, fairly, and finally — rather than allowing it to drag on through a 16th and 17th round while patients suffer.

The NHS is one of Britain's greatest institutions. It deserves better than this. So do the people waiting on those 7.31 million lists.