Consultants and specialist doctors in Northern Ireland are taking part in a 24-hour strike action.The action started at 7am on Thursday and has been described as the first time those two groups of doctors have gone on strike in the North.It is planned to operate with “Christmas Day-level” staffing, with routine and elective procedures cancelled, but emergency departments, intensive care and urgent care to function normally.The dispute centres on pay, with both branches of practice having voted in favour of industrial action over “18 years of pay erosion”.Resident doctors will also take part in a 24-hour industrial action on Monday.Dr David Farren, chairman of BMA’s Northern Ireland consultants committee (NICC), said pay erosion amid more complex work has caused anger.“No doctor wants to take strike action. “However, there is a palpable sense of anger among all secondary care doctors at years of significant pay erosion in return for trying to deliver care in an overstretched health system where their jobs have become more complex and pressured,” he said.“Add in the now annual uncertainty over late pay awards while our colleagues elsewhere in the UK are paid on time, along with the more lucrative contracts offered in the Republic of Ireland, and you create a hugely demoralising effect on doctors working in Northern Ireland.”Dr Leanne Davison, chairwoman of BMA’s Northern Ireland Specialists, Associate Specialists and Specialty Doctors Committee, added: “Our health service can no longer run on the goodwill of frontline staff.“Doctors are choosing to leave the health service or to reduce their contracted hours due to continued pay erosion and we can see the outworkings of this in services having to close due to staffing shortages.“Those with the power to change this have so far chosen not to, which has forced hospital doctors into the unacceptable position of taking strike action in order to be heard.”[ People in Northern Ireland have been pawns in a political game played in England for too longOpens in new window ]Northern Ireland health minister Mike Nesbitt expressed his disappointment at the strike.He said more than 90 per cent of services across the Health and Social Care system will proceed as planned, and advised that patients with scheduled appointments should attend as planned unless they have been directly contacted to advise their appointment has been postponed. – PA[ ‘It was all lies’: Brexit remorse in Northern IrelandOpens in new window ]