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