Speaking from a picket line at St Thomas’ Hospital in Westminster, BMA junior doctors committee co-chairman Dr Robert Laurenson said: “I don’t think the government wants to end this dispute.

“I think they are quite happy having the strikes happen. And I think they are failing everyone.”

He said that this round of action was due to Health Secretary Victoria Atkins’s negotiating delays and failure to improve an offer in December.

He said: “We are seeing the absolute collapse of goodwill.

“It has long been said that the NHS runs on goodwill, and now because we’ve seen that collapse I think we’re seeing the outcomes of the NHS collapse as well.”

Another doctor on the picket line outside St Thomas’, Dr Joseph Kendall, 30, said: “The only thing the government listens to is strike action.

“It is really disappointing because none of us want to be on strike.

“When you talk about waiting lists, it is just disingenuous to point the blame at our door.

“You’re looking at a waiting list of 7.6 million. That hasn’t occurred because of junior doctor strikes.”

Mr Sunak told BBC Radio York: “I come from an NHS family, of course I don’t want to run it down.

“We’re putting a record amount of investment in, more funding, so that’s never been higher – more doctors, more nurses, and we’re making improvements.

“When it comes to the waiting lists, in the last few months actually we’ve seen the waiting lists start to fall. And that’s because we haven’t had as much industrial action.

“Obviously there is once again industrial action, but at the end of last year we had no industrial action in October or November and the waiting list fell by about 150,000.”

The latest industrial action began at 7am on Saturday, with junior doctors returning to work at 11.59pm on Wednesday.