England's doctors set for 5-day strike before Christmas

Many United Kingdom residents will not get the medical help they want in the days before Christmas because of a strike by doctors at the state-owned National Health Service, or NHS.

The industrial action, which is part of the doctors' push for improved wages and conditions, means resident doctors in England will walk off the job for five days at 7 am on Dec 17.

The strike will hit as Britons prepare for the Christmas holidays on Dec 25 and Dec 26, which is traditionally a busy time for hospitals.

The British Medical Association announced the strike on Monday, with Jack Fletcher, chair of the BMA's resident doctors committee, saying resident doctors, who were formerly known as junior doctors, had "no choice" other than to withdraw their labor, because Wes Streeting, the UK's health minister, had failed to "put forward a credible plan" for addressing their grievances.

The five-day strike, which follows a similar strike in November and is the 14th since March 2003, will heap pressure on Streeting, who recently promised to cut wait times for NHS treatments, with a vow to ensure 92 percent of people in need of nonurgent NHS hospital treatment wait no longer than 18 weeks to start receiving care.

The walkout will also come as the NHS grapples with a burgeoning outbreak of seasonal flu, which is expected to be especially severe this winter.

Streeting said the latest strike amounts to a "cynical attempt to wreck Christmas" and will cause "untold anxiety" at the "busiest time of the year".

"These strikes are in no one's interest and there is no moral justification for them," the Financial Times quoted him as saying.

The long-running dispute between resident doctors and the government is centered on the doctors' claim that their wages have eroded considerably in value during the past 20 years.

Last summer, the BMA accepted a 22 percent pay rise over two years that many people thought would address many of the doctors' concerns. But the union has said additional large pay raises are still needed to restore salaries to their former levels.

Resident doctors make up around half of the UK's medical workforce and tend to be relatively recently qualified practitioners who have not chosen a specialized area of medicine.

During each of the resident doctors' strikes, senior doctors have taken on their roles, but the NHS has experienced significant disruption nevertheless and Streeting has said each five-day strike costs the NHS around 240 million pounds ($317 million).