This can't go on. NHS staff took a record 7.9million days off last year with mental health problems, stress, anxiety and depression – up 42 per cent since the start of the pandemic in 2020.

The health service has lost over 151million days to sickness since 2019 – triple the national average. Medical professionals once prided themselves on a devotion to their calling. Now they're three times as likely to be off sick.

Callously adding to that pressure on their colleagues, resident doctors are striking again, for the 15th time since 2023.

Union staff at the British Medical Association (BMA) headquarters have just downed tools too. Yes, really. 

Hundreds of BMA employees walked out over pay last week, and are striking again today, simultaneously with the resident doctors. The union that has spent three years bellowing at the NHS about fair pay but seems to have a different approach when holding the purse strings itself.

Every time doctors strike, more strain is put on those left standing, burning through what little resilience remains, pushing more staff towards the door. The ones bearing the brunt are nurses, porters, receptionists and others worn down by a system already buckling.

The financial picture is equally grim. The NHS is so desperate for staff during strikes that consultants across the country, including at my Trust, are offered up to £269 an hour to cover shifts – far more than the average daily salary.

Vast sums are being drained out of a service that already has nothing to spare. Finance for training posts has been scrapped to pay for strike cover. Future doctors are not getting the training places they need because of this exhausting, seemingly endless dispute.

To those like me who confront the consequences every day, it feels like slow disintegration: staff leaving, posts left empty or 'deleted' because of budget constraints, patients abandoned. 

And it's always the poorest patients who suffer the most – the ones with no option to go private, no way around the queue, just a letter telling them their appointment has been cancelled again.

I do have real sympathy for resident doctors. These are bright, dedicated people who have watched their pay being eaten away in real terms for more than a decade, and their frustration is not manufactured.

But sympathy has its limits. This generation of resident doctors receives study leave, time off before and after night shifts, and gold-plated pensions most workers could only dream of.

Once fully qualified, consultants and GPs have the option of supplementing already generous salaries with private work. This is not the portrait of a profession on the breadline.

But there is a sense of entitlement that would have been almost unrecognisable to my generation. A disproportionate number of junior doctors are from privileged backgrounds, and many of them look around at friends working in technology, finance and law, and feel they deserve equivalent financial compensation. 

The cynicism and jadedness among many of my younger colleagues is heartbreaking.

That shift in outlook has its roots in 1998, when Tony Blair introduced tuition fees. Medical students do receive some NHS support in their final years, but for the bulk of their training they pay full tuition fees and accumulate loans.

Most junior doctors I know qualify with debts close to £100,000. After paying that much for their training, they start to see their career as a purchase with a price attached – something to be compared with what their peers in other fields are earning.

My own training was funded by the state and I have never once thought of psychiatry as just a job. 

It's my calling. But years of institutional neglect by the BMA and successive governments have hollowed out that sense of vocation for many younger doctors.

There is a solution, though it requires imagination. Medical students should have their entire training funded by the state, free of fees and free of debt. 

In return, they would commit to working within the NHS for a stipulated period, perhaps 15 years. Those who broke that obligation would have to repay the cost.

This would keep more doctors in Britain, stem the haemorrhage of talent moving abroad and, perhaps most importantly, restore the psychological bond between the profession and the public it serves.

Resident doctors have already received pay rises totalling almost 29 per cent over the past three years. The government's offer for this year, which the BMA committee rejected without even putting it to a membership vote, would have been worth 4.9 per cent on average.

Many doctors are appalled by the trade body's actions. The BMA has wasted an enormous reservoir of national goodwill that individual doctors built up during the pandemic, often at a huge personal cost. Genuine, hard-won respect has been largely replaced by public weariness. And that I find truly sickening.