Kemi Badenoch has pledged to ban doctors’ strikes if the Conservatives return to power.
The Tory leader said that her party would introduce primary legislation to block medics from taking widespread industrial action, placing the same restrictions on them that apply to police officers and soldiers.
Thousands of resident doctors, previously known as junior doctors, began a five-day walkout on Friday after relations between the Government and British Medical Association (BMA) soured over a dispute about pay.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting has said the union will not be allowed to “hold the country to ransom” after receiving a 28.9% pay award over the last three years, the highest across the public sector.
The BMA says that despite this uplift, pay for resident doctors has declined by a fifth since 2008 once inflation is taken into account.
On Sunday, the Conservatives said they would reintroduce minimum service level requirements, which were brought in by the previous government and scrapped by Labour, across the health service.
Mrs Badenoch said: “The BMA has become militant, these strikes are going too far, and it is time for action.
“Doctors do incredibly important work. Medicine is a vocation, not just a job.
“That is why in government we offered a fair deal that supported doctors, but protected taxpayers too.”
She said the Tories were “making an offer in the national interest, we will work with the Government to face down the BMA to help protect patients and the NHS.”
Patients have been urged to attend appointments unless told otherwise while the action is ongoing, with NHS England saying hospitals are aiming to reschedule any cancellations due to strikes within two weeks.
Mr Streeting has warned of a challenging few days for the health service but said “we are doing everything we can to minimise” harm.
The BMA said the Tory pledge was “a desperate intervention from a Conservative Party that spent nearly 15 years failing the NHS – and is now trying to shift blame by attacking the rights of doctors”.
The chairman of the union’s council, Dr Tom Dolphin, said: “Threatening to ban strike action is not the right response for a modern democracy.
“Doctors aren’t militants – they’re professionals sounding the alarm about a health service in crisis. Silencing them won’t fix the NHS. Listening to them might.
“Patients are having operations or appointments postponed every single day in the NHS due to understaffing and lack of beds, and undervaluing staff contributes to that.”
The BMA says it remains ready to respond to any emergency requests for striking doctors to return to work in the event of an unforeseen emergency or mass casualty.
The union has agreed a number of “derogations” – processes whereby hospitals experiencing the most pressure can ask for some medics to come off picket lines – with NHS England since Friday.
Hospitals including Nottingham City, the Northern General in Sheffield and University Hospital Lewisham and St George’s Hospital in London have been granted such requests.
A Department of Health spokesperson said: “We know that previous rounds of strikes caused much wider levels of harm and so this Government is doing things differently.
“Working with NHS leaders, we’ve put in measures to keep as much urgent and planned care available and safe as we possibly can.
“During these strikes, all other NHS staff (including consultants and other specialist doctors) will still be working, and the focus of the NHS will be on ensuring as many services as possible continue to operate safely.”
