As junior doctors prepare to strike for six days this week, NHS Providers chief executive, Sir Julian Hartley, said:

"We can't afford another year of strikes. Ministers and unions must lose no time in getting get back round the negotiating table and finding a way to end the walkouts.

"Trust leaders are starting 2024 as they ended 2022, having to spend too much time planning for and coping with industrial action instead of putting all their energy into cutting waiting lists and giving patients first-class care.

"A year of industrial action has forced more than 1.2m planned appointments – including operations, scans and x-rays – to be delayed due to walkouts which have cost the NHS around £2bn.

"Now the longest-ever strike in NHS history will mean many more thousands of patients face delays and disruption on top of the equivalent of one and a half calendar months lost to industrial action since over the last year. With the NHS in the grip of peak winter pressure throughout the system, this week's strike by junior doctors couldn't come at a worse time.

"Trusts have planned thoroughly to keep patients safe and to provide critical and emergency care but the scale of the challenge in an unprecedented six-day strike will be bigger than ever before.

"We need a speedy resolution to this dispute as we see the risk of industrial action by other staff returning in our health services."