Nurses are set to announce more strikes on Friday that will involve more hospital staff as they escalate their fight with the government over NHS wages.
Royal College of Nursing (RCN) General Secretary Pat Cullen is expected to say the measures will apply to a wider range of locations across England from mid-January, as well as to all trusts in Northern Ireland and all but one medical centre. power in Wales.
There followed 10 days of no contact between the union and the government, despite a two-day strike that resulted in tens of thousands of nurses leaving their jobs.
The RCN has given Health Secretary Steve Barclay until Thursday evening to say he is ready to restart wage talks as strikes could escalate over the next month, but there is little sign that the government is ready to back down. The union has a mandate to continue trade union activities until July before it has to recall its members.
The RCN in Scotland will also send out bulletins in January about a possible strike after its members overwhelmingly rejected the Scottish government’s 7.5% average wage increase. The underpaid would receive an 11.3 percent pay increase.
About 82 percent of members backed out of the deal, and now, for the first time, employees can go on strike. It was also opposed by almost two-thirds of the members of the Royal College of Midwives.
Speaking to the Prime Minister on Thursday, Nicola Sturgeon said Scottish Health Minister Humza Yousaf would meet with unions on Friday to avoid strikes. However, she echoed Mr. Yusaf’s comments that the final deal was “the best and last offer.”
Health leaders have warned that the NHS is “dangerously close to full blown overheating” and called on the government to help fill a record 47,000 NHS vacancies.
Patricia Marquis, Director of RCN England: “Health and nursing are under enormous pressure in the run-up to Christmas. These numbers suggest that there is absolutely no slack in the system, dangerously close to total overheating.
“A key part of the problem is that the vast majority of hospital beds — about 95 percent — are occupied, including thousands of patients waiting to be discharged. The lack of community and social protection means that they will spend this Christmas in the hospital.
“The real reason for this is record nursing jobs in the NHS and tens of thousands more in medical and social services. Ministers can only solve this problem by addressing record nursing vacancies and valuing the profession accordingly, paying nurses fairly to retain and hire the staff that patients need.
Another strike by GMB paramedics and other lifeguards is scheduled for Dec. 28, with Unison to announce further union action dates Thursday night. Members of five rescue services in England eliminated on 11 and 23 January in a dispute over wages and personnel. The strike will affect London, Yorkshire, the North West, the North East and the South West and will follow the actions of members of three ambulance unions on Wednesday.
Ambulance delays outside the emergency room hit a new high in England even before the strike began, data released Thursday showed.
A quarter of ambulances, more than 16,000, were delayed more than an hour outside emergency rooms last week, as NHS leaders alerted many more new patients ahead of Christmas. Particularly concerned are those who did not seek medical help during the trade union action.
Hospitals reported 16,379 transfer delays of more than an hour last week, according to NHS England. That’s 24 percent of all ambulances arriving, up from 17 percent a week earlier. In the same week in December 2021, it was 7 percent, and in December 2020 it was only 5 percent.
The public has been warned that the public health sector remains under intense pressure ahead of Christmas despite the lifting of the highest alert levels in some places. The South Central Ambulance Service remained in critical condition on Thursday. A spokesman said the critical incident, which spans the entire Hampshire NHS, remains “under significant ongoing pressure.”
NHS Confederation Director General Matthew Taylor said: “This winter is going to be incredibly tough. We can not do anything with it. But the actions of trade unions exacerbate an already difficult situation.
“We will repeat the call to the unions and the government to move away from rhetoric and move on to negotiations. We must not slip into more and more trade union action.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Welfare said 7,000 new real and virtual hospital beds will be created and £500m will be invested to speed up the process of discharge of patients from hospitals to social institutions. The money also went towards recruiting additional call handlers and upgrading ambulances.
Source: I News
I’m Raymond Molina, a professional writer and journalist with over 5 years of experience in the media industry. I currently work for 24 News Reporters, where I write for the health section of their news website. In my role, I am responsible for researching and writing stories on current health trends and issues. My articles are often seen as thought-provoking pieces that provide valuable insight into the state of society’s wellbeing.