Bloody Hell! Lights, Camera, Strike Action: Physician Morality and the Broken Promises of the British National Health Service

Abstract

Resident doctors of the British National Health Service have gone on strike fifteen times in the last three years, leading to over 1.5 million patient appointment cancellations and a loss of billions of pounds. Public debate has cast these strikes as a moral crisis, asking whether doctors, bound by centuries of moral exceptionalism, can ever ethically withdraw their labor. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in London, including interviews with physicians and patients, participant observation in public and private medical settings, and an analysis of media coverage, this thesis offers a two-part intervention. Currently in the UK, approximately 40,980 doctors will apply for the mere 12,833 Specialty Training (ST) posts available to match into this year. Given this reality, the doctors I spoke with treated the ethical question of strikes as secondary to navigating their precarious job realities. Through additional shadowing with two South Asian physicians, with one excluded from clinical roles and the other running his own private medical practice, I came to learn that even this understanding is incomplete as it collapses doctors into a single, uniform category and obscures how the NHS's demands fall unevenly across different bodies, especially in a system where 40% of doctors are non-UK nationals. Taken together, this thesis argues that the British media produces and spreads a specific moral panic, in addition to obscuring how the burdens of the NHS manifest differently along lines of race and identity. Drawing on anthropologies of labor and medicine, this thesis demonstrates how the failures of the British healthcare system are ultimately misdiagnosed and misattributed.