Patients in Devon are not supposed to call their local GPs to check on their appointments. Residents in Gloucestershire have been encouraged to avoid ringing 999 unless the situation is life-threatening. Once again, people are being asked to stay away from the health service – not because of a pandemic this time, but because today marks the largest workers’ strike in the NHS’s history. Royal College of Nursing union members are walking out in over a third of NHS England Trusts, with over 10,000 GMB and Unite ambulance workers joining them.
As we’ve learned from this ongoing series of strikes, they don’t tend to create mass queues outside hospitals or photos of overrun surgeries. People tend to listen – and stay away. Calls to the London Ambulance Service fell by a quarter last month, on the day workers had walked out. The month before, the West Midlands Ambulance trust saw calls fall by a staggering 70 per cent. We should expect nothing different today.
Of course, people don’t happen to be healthier on strike days: patients are opting for their own transportation, or far more worrying, just staying home. All this is happening at a time when waiting lists are at a record high, it’s taking ambulances 90 minutes on average to show up for an ‘emergency’ call (on a non-strike day) and excess deaths are measuring, on average, more than 1,000 a week.
What’s interesting about the narrative around today’s strikes is that no one – including those going on strike – are pretending anymore that this isn’t having an impact on patient safety. In a statement, ten chief nurses across leading hospitals have called on the government to reopen pay negotiations because ‘industrial action means appointments cancelled, diagnostics delayed [and] operations postponed. The longer industrial action lasts, the greater the potential for positions to harden, waits for patients to grow, and risks of harm to accumulate.’ This echoes the comments from the NHS Confederation back in December, that ‘some now tell us that they cannot guarantee patient safety’ when these strikes take place.
It is, of course, a point that ministers have been making during these disputes, too. They have further spurred on the government’s proposed legislative change to require more sectors (including health) to provide a standard of minimal service during strike action. But with the public still firmly on the side of the nurses in regard to their pay, the pressure continues to be on ministers to come to the table and negotiate.
Alongside today’s strikes we’ve had an update from Sir Gordon Messenger, head of the review of health and social care leadership, who has said that ‘throwing money’ at the NHS’s current problems is not a recipe for fixing them. His comments will also raise questions about where the huge sums during the Covid years have gone (taking the UK’s health spending as a percentage of GDP into the top five for OECD countries) if it hasn’t gone to healthcare workers on the front line.
This is all a reminder that what gets funnelled into the NHS so often fails to find its way to the right people: neither workers nor patients are feeling the benefits.
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