In recent years, physicians’ strikes have become more and more common around the world. Thus, for example, in the past decade physicians’ strikes have taken place, inter alia, in Australia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, India, Luxembourg, Malta, Nigeria, Portugal and Slovenia, against a background of the increase in the amount of physicians that are members of trade unions around the world¹ and the physicians’ decreasing satisfaction with their conditions of employment in the profession (including with regard to issues relating to the burden of work, low salary, etc.).²

Thus, for example, in France surgeons declares a strike in 2004 in order to struggle for an improvement in conditions and an increase in the amount paid for surgery — a rate that had not been revised for 15 years. The physicians also threatened to leave France in order to prevent an order being made against them to return to work. Ultimately, an agreement was signed before the surgeons left the country. The agreement included an improvement in the employment conditions of surgeons — including an improvement in the condition of operating theaters — and an increase in the remuneration of the surgeons, including a supplement for being on-call.

The following table describes the main physicians’ strikes that took place around the world in the last two years.

Physicians’ Strikes around the World, 2010-2011

¹    L.P. Landry, Organized medicine must assume a leadership role in protecting Canada's health care system, CMAJ 1993 December 1; 149(11): 1720–1722.   

²    Nigel Edwards, Mary Jane Kornacki, Jack Silversin, Unhappy doctors: what are the causes and what can be done? BMJ 2002;324:835–8; Janice Hopkins Tanne, US GPs are Unhappy, Underpaid, Deluged by Paperwork, and want to retire, study says, BMJ 2008; 337:a2711; Frank Frizelle, Is it Ethical for Doctors to Strike? The New Zealand Medical Journal, 23 June 2006, vol. 119, no. 1236.