Category Archives: NHS

How will the NHS strikes affect you?

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Ambulance workers and nurses are taking action in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Here’s what to expect

• Nurses pledge tougher strikes

Nurses will hold their second day of strike action on Tuesday in more than 70 trusts and health organisations in England, Wales and northern Ireland. On Wednesday, three unions, the GMB, Unison and Unite, will take strike action at ambulance trusts across the country. More than 10,000 ambulance workers in the GMB have voted to strike at nine trusts in England and Wales.

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Nurses pledge tougher new strikes as NHS crisis deepens

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Nursing union gives ministers until Thursday to open pay talks as first signs emerge of bid to end dispute and prevent NHS collapse

• How will NHS strikes affect you?

Union leaders threatened on Saturday night to order a fresh wave of more severe strikes in the new year in which nurses would offer “less generous” support inside hospitals, in a dramatic escalation of their pay dispute with the government.

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN), in a marked hardening of its line, said there would be “more hospitals and more nurses taking part than at present” in strikes throughout January, unless ministers backed down by Thursday.

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Pressure on ministers to avert NHS strikes ahead of ‘very challenging’ week

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NHS Providers boss says nurses’ strike had ‘significant impact’ as senior Tories urge government to negotiate

Planned strikes next week will be “very challenging” for the health service, hospital bosses have warned, after they conceded that Thursday’s nurses strikes had had a “significant impact”.

The comments from NHS Providers came amid mounting pressure on the government from senior backbenchers and usually supportive newspapers to try to resolve the dispute.

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Rishi Sunak says not to expect imminent breakthrough in talks to resolve Northern Ireland protocol issues – UK politics live

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Prime minister says he is ‘committed’ to fixing issues but says there is no deadline on talks

In his latest column, Simon Jenkins argues that instead of fighting for the centre ground, Keir Starmer should look to the radical changes pushed through under Harold Wilson.

Wes Streeting has declined to say whether a Labour government would agree to a pay rise for nurses.

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Nurses strike live: Labour MPs join nurses on picket lines after second Tory MP publicly calls for government to increase pay offer

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Multiple Labour MPs join picket lines after Tory MP for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich urges government to improve offer

On the picket line outside St Thomas’ hospital in Westminster, Linda Tovey, a critical care nurse, said: “It’s increasingly difficult to come to work and go home and think: ‘Actually I don’t think I can turn the heating on.’

“My wages aren’t bad for a nurse but I still have to think about what I’m doing with my money every month and that is not the position I imagined myself being in.
“People do a huge amount of extra work, in terms of studying and all that kind of stuff, and you don’t get the recognition in terms of wages.

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Scotland to spend extra £1bn on health by raising taxes on higher earners

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Scottish government promises to tackle health and social care crisis to protect weakest and poorest

The Scottish government has promised to spend another £1bn on tackling the crisis in health and social care by raising taxes on higher earners and holiday homes.

John Swinney, Scotland’s acting finance secretary, said the burden of increasing NHS funding would fall heavily on everyone earning more than £43,663 in Scotland as part of a “social contract” to protect the weakest and poorest.

The abolition of a cap on council tax increases next year, alongside £550m extra for councils.

The uprating of all Scottish welfare benefits by 10%, increasing welfare spending by £433m.

£222m on school support for the poorest and extra free school meals in primaries.

£15m for a pilot project to scrap peak-time rail fares.

£336m on home energy efficiency and reducing fuel poverty.

The abolition of non-domestic rates for 100,000 smaller shops and businesses and a freeze in business rates charges, which would cost £356m.

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Hot drinks and public sympathy for nurses on the picket lines

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For many striking in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, staff shortages are a bigger issue than pay

In many professions, working a 14-hour day with no break would be unthinkable, but for many nurses on freezing picket lines across the country on Thursday it is increasingly becoming the norm.

“It’s tough at the moment,” said Ella Savage, a children’s specialist nurse at Leeds General Infirmary, where about 200 nurses were gathered at one of 125 Royal College of Nursing (RCN) pickets across England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

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Welsh health board urges public to avoid emergency departments

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Ambulance service blames demand, staff sickness, and patient handover times for elderly man being taken to hospital on plank

The health board for the area where an 89-year-old man was taken to hospital strapped to a plank because no ambulances were available has said the flow of patients through its hospitals is blocked because hundreds of medically fit people have nowhere safe to be discharged to.

They have urged people to stay away from emergency departments unless their need is dire.

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‘Like a horrific board game’: 33 hours inside an NHS in crisis

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Crammed wards, burnt-out GPs, patients waiting hours for ambulances – the health service is at breaking point

Inside the dimly lit command centre at King’s College hospital, staff arriving for the first beds meeting of the day are greeted with a warning: the hospital is already under strain. “So, we are under pressure this morning,” the head of nursing, Naomi Hosking, informs colleagues stood around her in a semi-circle. No one registers surprise. “We’ve got a lot of patients in ED [emergency department] with little space to see new patients, so we need to get some early movement.”

It’s 8.32am and ED – maximum capacity 60 – is packed, with 61 patients inside. The oldest is 98; the youngest 30 days old. Later, that pressure will intensify: the number of ED patients – in beds, on trolleys or in chairs – will more than double to 137.

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Nurses will strike this week in UK after talks with health secretary stall

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Royal College of Nursing leader criticises ‘belligerence’ in meeting with Steve Barclay at which ministers refused to discuss pay

Nurses’ strikes will go ahead this week after a meeting between the union and the health secretary ended in deadlock, with the Royal College of Nursing condemning ministers’ “belligerence” for refusing to discuss pay.

Six hundred military personnel from all three armed forces will start training to drive ambulances to cover for striking NHS workers across the UK later this month. A further 150 are being readied to act as logistical support, defence sources said, with training for both groups to start “shortly”.

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NHS operations cancelled in England due to staff shortages double in three years

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Labour highlights issue to back up pledge to invest heavily in addressing shortages

The number of operations cancelled by the NHS in England because of staff shortages may have doubled in three years, with an estimated 30,000 not proceeding because no staff were available to perform them.

At least a third of cancelled operations were those that were deemed urgent, according to the analysis by Labour. It suggested at least 2,500 cancelled operations for cancer patients and 8,000 on children.

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RCN accuse government of ‘belligerence’ as talks to avert strike action fail; Wales strikes to go ahead – as it happened

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Royal College of Nursing says Steve Barclay refused to discuss pay at meeting on Monday; Welsh nurses to strike after last-minute talks fail. This blog is now closed

Pat Cullen, the Royal College of Nursing’s general secretary, told ITV this morning that there was no point talking to Steve Barclay, the health secretary, if he was not prepared to discuss pay. She said

What I’m saying … to the health secretary this morning, is if you don’t want to speak to me directly about nurses’ pay, we have engaged with the conciliation service Acas, they can do that through Acas, but our door is absolutely wide open and it appears at the minute that theirs is totally shut …

Fundamentally, I need to get to a table and talk to them about pay. This isn’t just me, it’s the 320,000 nurses that voted for strike action … They voted through an independent ballot that we carried out and surely to goodness you couldn’t look at one of those people this morning in the eye and say: ‘You’re not worth an extra brown penny’. In my mind they absolutely are.

I think it’s a very challenging international picture. About a third of the world’s economies are predicted to be in recession, either this year or next.

We’re no different in this country and truthfully, it is likely to get worse before it gets better, which makes it even more difficult when we have big public sector strikes going on at the moment.

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Exclusive: health unions offer to pause NHS strikes if government join pay talks

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Royal College of Nursing and Unison call on health secretary to negotiate with them to avoid action at Christmas and new year

Health unions made a dramatic offer on Saturday night to suspend a wave of planned strikes that threatens to cripple the NHS over Christmas and the new year if ministers agree to open serious discussions over pay.

The moves by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) and the country’s biggest union, Unison, are the first signs of flexibility by either side in a dispute that has been deadlocked for weeks.

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Officers unlikely to stand in for striking ambulance drivers, police chiefs say

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Combination of overstretched forces and few licensed drivers means requests expected to be turned down

Police say they will not replace striking ambulance drivers as health trusts scramble to limit the effects of a wave of industrial action.

The trusts, which are responsible for running ambulances, have approached individual police forces to see if officers might ferry patients to and from hospital.

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Nurses’ union leader Pat Cullen: ‘I follow through on what I believe in’

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The RCN boss poised to lead the first NHS-wide strike reflects on her long-established readiness to tackle perceived injustices

Pat Cullen tells a story that is very revealing about the character of the woman who is about to lead Britain’s nurses into their first-ever NHS-wide strike – herself.

Almost 40 years ago, back in 1983, Cullen was an 18-year-old trainee nurse at Holywell psychiatric hospital in Antrim, Northern Ireland. She was appalled that under its “token economy system” staff punished patients whose behaviour proved difficult by taking away their personal possessions – sweets, cigarettes, washbags or blankets.

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Delays in seeing a GP mean millions will get diagnosis too late, says Labour

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Serious illnesses among estimated 5m people in England who could not get an appointment in October may have been missed

Millions of people in England are struggling to get GP appointments and as a result some will not have serious medical conditions diagnosed until it is “too late”, Labour has warned.

The party has made new estimates based on the latest GP appointment figures for England with GP patient survey data.

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Strep A: No 10 tells parents to look for signs of infection with reports of eighth death

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Warning comes as health official says earlier start to cases in UK could be knock-on effect of pandemic

Downing Street has told parents to be on the lookout for signs of strep A infection after reports a primary-school pupil has become the eighth child to die in a matter of weeks.

On Monday, Alison Syred-Paul, headteacher at Morelands primary in Waterlooville, Hampshire, said: “Very tragically, we have learned of the death in recent days of a child who attended our school, who was also diagnosed with an invasive Group A streptococcal (iGAS) infection.”

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Hip and knee ops fell by more in UK than in any EU nation in 2020

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Hip replacements fell 46% in UK as a result of Covid and knee operations by 68%, study finds

Britain may be the hobbling man of Europe, according to figures showing that the fall in the number of hip and knee surgeries as a result of the Covid pandemic was greater in the UK than in any EU country.

The number of hip replacement operations fell 46% in 2020 in the UK, compared with just 7% in Germany and 12% in France. Meanwhile, the number of knee operations slumped 68% in the UK, compared with just 3% in Finland and an average of 24% across the EU.

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‘A gift of life’: the NHS double lung transplant that saved Covid patient

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After months in intensive care, Cesar Franco became the first person in Britain to have the operation because of the virus

“When I woke up I was confused. I remembered the doctors in St George’s hospital deciding to intubate me. But when I woke up from the intubation, I’d been transferred to another hospital, St Thomas’, and was on a machine that was keeping me alive. I wondered how things had gotten so bad and how I’d gone from being just ill to being, you know, very close to dying.”

Cesar Franco is reliving how he fell gravely ill with Covid-19 late last year and ended up in the intensive care unit (ICU) of St Thomas’ hospital in central London, helpless, struggling to breathe and only still alive thanks to the quiet pumping of an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (Ecmo) machine. It was the start of what became five arduous, precarious months in ICU on Ecmo. That is an unusually long time, even for a Covid patient, to receive what, for some but not all, proves to be life-saving care.

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Timetable of trouble: the wave of strikes set to hit the Tories this winter

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Rampant inflation and government policy has brought matters to a head: so where is disruption going to hit and what are the unions asking for?

Strikes are not something most managers think about. The oft-mentioned “winter of discontent” and year-long miners’ strike were features of the late 1970s and mid-1980s. Since then, industrial action in the private and public sectors has fallen to a level so low that academics have given up studying it.

When pay talks began a year ago for the current financial year, inflation was rising, but the Bank of England was reasonably certain it would be temporary. Union leaders prepared for a post-pandemic battle over pay, but not one that would probably end in strike action.

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