According to one doctor, Naadir Ansari, who had been a junior doctor, the work load was daunting. While the work load he faced is no longer the case, in his day it put patients at clear risk, he told the Guardian.

"I used to do 120 hour weeks. I used to do 56 hour shifts. If you were lucky you got to sleep. If you weren’t, you didn’t,” he says.

“I remember walking down the corridor in the middle of the night toward the end of one those shifts and talking to a person next to me who wasn’t really there - I was that exhausted. How can that possibly be safe?”

The new contract, he is afraid, may open the door to a return to such risky hours. It also will drive doctors out of the system, he fears, noting that “of junior doctors finishing their foundation years, 52 percent are going into the NHS, 48 percent aren’t.

“That’s a lot of graduates who aren’t going into the NHS. This is a time when the NHS is in crisis. We don’t have a lot of doctors and we can’t attract them in. Making a contract that’s even worse is not going to improve that.”

To support this supposition, according to a recent inline poll by a junior doctor network, not affiliated with the BMA, of 1,045 junior doctors, 922 said they were prepared to quit when asked if they were “prepared to consider resignation in the face of imposition of the contract in its current form.”

A YouGov poll after the latest strike has indicated that the public largely supports the doctors, according to The Guardian. It found 49 percent supporting the right to strike vs. 31 percent who thought it wrong. When it came to blame, 45 percent put it on the government, 12 percent on the BMA and 30 percent on both.

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