An emergency room nurse who plans to go on strike next month says she doesn’t know how her hospital will stay anomaly-free if the influx of incoming patients continues.
The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) last week announced a significant escalation in strikes that will last 48 hours continuously from 1 to 3 March.
Staff from more than 120 NHS employers will be laid off, and there will be no drastic cuts in emergency rooms, intensive care units and cancer units as in previous rounds of strikes.
Frances, a chief emergency room nurse working at a London hospital, said she feels she’s being “divided” about whether to go on strike, but the daily damage to patients and nurses pushes her to to go further. month.
“It has gotten a lot worse over the past week, especially at my job. We have longer waiting times, people are waiting for hours to get into a hospital bed. We simply believe that if the government does nothing, nurses will leave the NHS and there will be no NHS,” she said. I.
During the latest strikes in February, Frances said doctors in her emergency department came during the day to attend to the striking nurses, but nurses who returned from picketing at night were able to help deal with the large number of patients who were trapped. She said she was “uncomfortable” thinking about how it would affect patients and she was unsure how emergency care could work if the strikes lasted 48 hours.
“It’s quite an unpleasant thought to imagine that you won’t work for two days and what this might mean for our patients. Because there are not enough doctors to make everything as safe as we do.
“That’s something I’m worried about, especially with the work of the last few days, without us they wouldn’t be able to handle it.”
But she said conditions for patients would only get worse if left unchecked, and that persistent underpayment and understaffing was causing burnout.
“I knew I would never make that much money from this job, but I just think people have no idea what we deal with every day. We are regularly attacked at work, one employee is attacked every shift.
Frances said she hoped the government would step in and negotiate wages before the strike was forced.
The RCN said it continues to negotiate with the NHS at the national level as part of its commitment to life and health. Services are reduced to a minimum and instead hospitals must rely on members of other trade unions and members of other health professions.
Dr. Layla McKay, Director of NHS Confederation Policy, said this earlier. I Hospital leaders were still trying to figure out exactly how to define life and limb coverage.
“This is new territory for unions not offering these exemptions and I think we are all trying to figure out what that will mean,” Ms McKay added.
Ms McKay said it was not clear what the government’s “end game” was. “The government is not responding to calls to talk about wages, unions say it’s important to talk about wages, this is a confrontation that we can’t leave forever – it’s bad for the workforce, bad for patients, bad for society. a country.”
Health and Human Services Minister Steve Barclay insisted in a statement that he spoke to RCN “about what’s fair and affordable” in the upcoming pay year and also talked about the workload.
“The failure to provide coverage for essential services such as cancer treatment during the strikes is a major escalation by the Royal College of Nursing and puts patient safety at risk.
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.