Dr Clodagh Corrigan, deputy chair of BMA’s Northern Ireland Council, said: “Today’s announcement is another outcome of failing to deliver proper long-term workforce planning that both values doctors and acknowledges growing patient need. Pay is a key factor in recruiting and retaining doctors to work in Northern Ireland, and yet secondary care doctors here are rewarded for delivering care in an overstretched health system with successive below inflation and late pay awards. We have yet to receive our pay uplift for this year while our colleagues elsewhere in the UK have received this months ago. This is demoralising and is why all secondary care doctors are in dispute with the Department of Health over pay.
 
“Alongside this is the need to ensure full transparency is at the heart of any decisions around service reconfiguration. Doctors, staff and other key stakeholders must be involved and consulted at all stages to foster support. The abrupt announcement of a health service closure because there are no doctors to safely staff it causes unacceptable staff anxiety and uncertainty that can be avoided with proper planning and meaningful stakeholder engagement. It is also the opposite of the planned and managed transformation that we want to see, and what was recommended in the Bengoa Report.”