Pay offer being considered by health unions

"I put the plan to them and they accepted it as a serious proposal, but it is one they need to go away and think about and consult upon," he said.

"Equally, they have given challenges to me that I need to take to executive colleagues, beginning with the first and the deputy first minister, and I will do that at pace.

"What we are in now is a process. I think now everyone recognises that the resolution to this will require an all-executive approach, and that is to all public sector pay, not just health,"

The BMA said in July this year, the Doctors’ and Dentists’ Pay Review Body (DDRB) recommended an uplift of 6% for all doctors, and this had already been applied in the rest of the UK.

Its Northern Ireland council chair Dr Alan Stout said the minister had told the BMA he was not in a position to make the full pay award.

"On behalf of all doctors in Northern Ireland, I made it clear this was totally unacceptable," Dr Stout said.

"I will now meet with the chairs of all the BMA branch of committees in Northern Ireland to seek their views on how to proceed.

“The scale of anger and outrage I have been hearing over the course of the last week is unprecedented. Doctors here are totally disillusioned with the Department of Health and its attitude towards doctors’ pay."

Earlier, First Minister Michelle O'Neill said that a winter of strike action by various unions in Northern Ireland over pay is “not inevitable”.

On Wednesday, unions representing teachers said they will also ballot their members on strike action.

O’Neill said she hoped there could be a “positive resolution”.

“We also have been faced with the fact they’ve settled pay in England but not here, we’ve allocated 57% of the budget this week to health,” she added.

O’Neill said she and the Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly met the health minister on Wednesday night, ahead of his discussions with the unions.

Little-Pengelly said the executive had to “work within the budget” it had.

“A certain amount of funding has to go towards funding those frontline services, that is a finite amount of money,” she said.

“The executive will be doing their best that is our promise.”

O'Neill said that it's a "challenging situation" and the the executive does not want workers to go on strike.

"We will work to find solutions. I don’t think anything’s inevitable, we will work night and day to make sure we can get a positive resolution."