1975: a year of doctors' strikes

Junior doctors protest in 2015. iStock.com/kelvinjay

By Beth Roberts

As trainee doctors continue to strike in 2023, we look back at the history of NHS industrial action and how trainees and consultants both went on strike for the first time in the same year.

The 1970s saw industry after industry taking industrial action against employers and the government over pay and working conditions. By the middle of the decade, this fervour for industrial action finally spread to the NHS, and eventually to doctors.¹

Since it had been established in 1948, the NHS had not seen much industrial action and medicine was viewed as a more conservative industry.¹ But NHS employees were pushed to breaking point by rising inflation combined with low salaries and a lack of NHS pay rises – conditions which may seem all too familiar.²

In 1972, the Department of Employment warned that the NHS “has for a long time been able to get by on the goodwill of its employees”.² Dr Chaand Nagpaul, former British Medical Association (BMA) Chair, echoed this in 2022: “[The government] needs to grasp that the NHS has survived to this point solely thanks to the goodwill of staff, goodwill which has been shamefully cast aside.”³