Health Secretary Victoria Atkins has warned union barons a new pay offer will only be on the table if they end their crippling strikes.
Ms Atkins said people have left at home “in pain, who are in distressed” because their operations and appointments have been cancelled.
She added that if the walkouts were called off, “we will be back round the table in 20 minutes”.
Hospital bosses have warned cancer patients and women caesarean section births could come to harm unless January’s plans are cancelled. They also warned more patients could go blind if they don’t receive the eye surgery they require.
Ms Atkins declared yesterday: “My one ask of the BMA (British Medical Association) is very simple: Call off the strikes. Why won’t you call off the strikes? And please get around the table with me because we can get this done.
“Please come back round the table, call off the strikes and then we can see how much further we can go.
“It’s not just about pay, of course this is really important and indeed this year alone, junior doctors have already had a pay rise of around 8.8%, the most-junior of doctors, the first and second year of doctors, they’ve had the highest pay rises within the range up to 10.3% because we understand as a Government, we’ve heard what the doctors are saying to us.
“But I also want to do more than that, I don’t just want to look at pay, I also want to look at their conditions because when I walk around hospitals, when I talk to doctors, they tell me one of the things they want to feel is valued. And I absolutely understand that and I want to work with them to enable that to happen. “
Ms Atkins also suggested some medics are “deeply uncomfortable” about the timing of strikes.
Junior doctors in England are on the second day of a 72-hour walkout and are due to return to work at 7am on December 23.
They will also strike for six days from January 3, the longest spell of industrial action in the NHS’s history.
The chief executive of NHS Employers, Danny Mortimer, told Banfield in the letter that patients who needed to be treated urgently would be in danger of suffering damage to their health during the strike if the care they usually receive was not available because there were too few staff to provide it.
He identified the areas of care as “fast progressing cancers; time-critical inductions and urgent ‘elective’ C-sections; [and] corneal transplant surgeries”.
The Health Secretary said there were people at home “who are in pain, who are in distress, who have had their operations and their appointments cancelled” and “that’s not acceptable for them as patients and for us as a system”.
She added: “There will be many, many doctors listening to this who feel deeply uncomfortable that their committee has called these strikes at this time. I would encourage anyone who feels like that quietly to consider whether this committee is in fact representing their views.
“I know, for example, that consultants and nurses and other doctors who aren’t on strike are, today and yesterday, and will be over January, coming in, doing extra shifts to ensure that that level of care is provided for patients.
“They are being expected by the junior doctors’ committee to pick up the slack of their strikes.”
But the British Medical Association (BMA) claimed Ms Atkins should “stop trying to divide” the profession and “turn her focus to getting back around the table” with junior doctors.
BMA junior doctors committee co-chairmen, Dr Robert Laurenson and Dr Vivek Trivedi, said: “It’s disappointing after what we felt was an improved tone and approach from Ms Atkins, compared with that of her predecessor, that she appears to have a different recollection of our discussions.
“Throughout negotiations with the Government we had a mutually agreed deadline for them to make a credible offer. This deadline passed and we were therefore forced to call strikes.
“We did not walk away from negotiations and we are happy to talk to Ms Atkins at any time. It is the Government’s insistence that they will not talk while strikes are scheduled that is blocking progress and wasting unnecessary time.
“We appeal directly to Ms Atkins and the Government to drop this precondition and get back around the table.”
