New BMA RDC chair ‘determined to stand up for doctors’

Dr Callum Parr. Credit: BMA

By Sarah Lowden

The new chair of the British Medical Association’s UK resident doctors committee has pledged to “deliver more progress and wins” for the thousands of doctors he now represents.

Dr Callum Parr, who was previously the deputy chair and lead negotiator of the RDC, said there was a “huge amount to do” to tackle the issues making medicine feel like an “ever more precarious” career choice.

However, he added that the “pressure is not inevitable: it is the result of decisions made by policymakers, and by applying our own pressure in turn we can fight back and fix the problems that face us”.

Parr, an internal medicine trainee in London, takes over from Dr Jack Fletcher, who led the UKRDC during multiple strike actions and oversaw a pay deal agreement for resident doctors in England.

Fletcher thanked everyone who had contributed to the committee’s work including securing “the largest structural pay reform to resident doctors' pay in well over a decade”, as well as commitments from the government to create an extra 4,500 jobs, and the introduction of permanent contracts for locally employed doctors.