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Resident doctors in England began a six-day strike on April 7, 2026, the Guardian reported, after rejecting a deal that offered a 4.9% average pay rise and up to 4,500 new training posts.

The walkout, the 15th since March 2023, exposes a problem South Korea faced from the opposite direction two years earlier: a country can argue over how many doctors to produce and still leave its hospitals leaning on trainees who feel stuck.

Resident doctors, formerly called junior doctors, fill the first years of a medical career, and many work on fixed-term contracts. 

The British Medical Association wants pay restored to 2008 levels, which it calculates as a further 26% rise after inflation.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting told the Guardian the rejected package would have lifted average pay 4.9% in 2026-27 and 35.2% over four years, with at least 6.2% for the lowest paid.

Talks collapsed over timing because the government offered £700 million in faster progression pay spread across three years, while the union wanted all of it in 2026-27, the Guardian reported on March 25, 2026.

Dr Jack Fletcher, chair of the BMA's resident doctors committee, accused the government of shifting the goalposts in the final two weeks of talks.

The fight reaches past salaries to jobs.

Newly qualified doctors in England must compete for specialty training posts to advance, and the government had promised up to 4,500 extra posts over three years, with the first 1,000 due in April 2026.

Wes Streeting says “Instead of accepting this offer, the BMA rejected it outright and announced immediate strike action. Not only does this torpedo the pay rises and training posts available to resident doctors, but it also puts at risk the recovery of the NHS.” 

Heather Gunn, a 27-year-old resident doctor in Oxford, told the Guardian she now expects unemployment when her contract ends in August, because the pediatrics or emergency medicine post she hoped for no longer exists.

"I'm disgusted the government thinks it's a bargaining chip they can play around with," she said.

NHS officials estimated the six days would cost about £300 million and push total strike costs past £3 billion since 2023.

Sir Jim Mackey, the chief executive of NHS England, wrote to hospital bosses that the union had timed the strike to cause havoc over the Easter holidays, when many staff had already booked leave, the Guardian reported on April 8, 2026.

South Korea lived through a mirror image of this dispute in 2024.

On February 20, 2024, Korean interns and residents walked off the job, and by February 27, about 8,940 of the country's 13,000 trainees had left their hospitals, the Associated Press reported, after the government announced it would raise medical school admissions by 2,000 a year from 3,058.

Korean officials pointed to an aging population and 2.1 doctors per 1,000 people, far below the developed-world average of 3.7.

The trainees argued that schools could not absorb so many students at once and that new graduates would still crowd into well-paid fields like dermatology and plastic surgery, leaving pediatrics, obstetrics, and emergency rooms short.

Ahn Cheol-soo, a doctor turned lawmaker, warned on television that without fixes for those essential fields, "2,000 new dermatology hospitals will be established in Seoul 10 years later."

The walkout also revealed how much big hospitals depended on trainees, who made up 30% to 40% of doctors at some major centers and assisted in surgeries and inpatient care, AP reported on February 26, 2024.

Hospitals canceled surgeries, the government opened military hospital emergency rooms to the public, and officials threatened license suspensions for anyone who failed to return by February 29, 2024.

The two countries pulled in opposite directions, Korea toward more medical students and England's doctors toward more training posts and higher pay.

Both disputes, though, ran into the same question: producing doctors and placing them in the right training posts and specialties turned out to need separate answers.

The England strike runs until 6:59 am on Monday, April 13, 2026, and Mackey has warned hospital leaders to expect a long slog of further walkouts.