Tens of thousands of nurses across England and Wales walked out Wednesday in a new protest over pay and patient safety, with no end in sight to a wave of strikes that has piled pressure on the overburdened public health system.
About a quarter of hospitals and clinics in England will be affected by the two 12-hour nursing strikes on Wednesday and Thursday. Emergency care and cancer treatment will continue, but thousands of appointments and procedures are likely to be postponed.
With more walkouts by nurses planned for next month (with Northern Ireland and Scotland likely to join) — and ambulance workers announcing a new slate of February strikes — the conservative government is under growing pressure to lift its opposition to salary increases for healthcare staff amid skyrocketing inflation.
Inflation in the UK hit a 41-year high of 11.1 percent in October, driven by sharply rising energy and food costs, before easing slightly to 10.5 percent in December.
Nurses are also sounding the alarm about patient safety at the overstretched National Health Service (NHS).
“It’s a job that I love, but I need to pay my bills,” said intensive care nurse Nav Singh, on a picket line in London. “Nursing students don’t want to be nurses, experienced nurses are leaving, there will be no one left and I don’t blame them, but I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
Worst staffing crisis since 1948
But the strike is also about patient safety: Yusuf Mahmud Nazir, 5, died from pneumonia after being sent home, despite a doctor describing his tonsillitis as the worst he had ever seen.
Martin Clark, 68, was driven to hospital by his family after they waited 45 minutes for an ambulance when he suffered chest pains at home. He later died after a cardiac arrest.
The situation is being described as the worst crisis since the NHS was set up in 1948, particularly regarding accident and emergency (A&E) care but also including longer waiting times for appointments and treatment.
“We go to work every day as nurses, and we do our best, and our best isn’t enough right now, and that’s because our workload keeps increasing and our resources aren’t matching that,” Orla Dooley, an accident an emergency nurse, said.
“It is about people’s mums, who are at home in the community having heart attacks and not having treatment, because there’s no ambulances to go out to them. It’s about your dad not having surgery for cancer, because there’s no bed for him to go to after his operation. And it’s about your granny dying on a ward by herself because there’s no nurse to hold her hand because there just isn’t enough nurses. That’s what it’s about.”
According to NHS England, a record 54,532 people in December waited for more than 12 hours once arriving at A&E.
“People aren’t dying because nurses are striking. Nurses are striking because people are dying. That is how severe things are in the NHS and it is time the prime minister led a fight for its future,” said Pat Cullen, head of the Royal College of Nursing union.
“Today’s record number of unfilled nurse jobs cannot be left to get worse. Pay nursing staff fairly to turn this around and give the public the care they deserve,” Cullen added.
Which patient to admit?
A&E doctor Waheed Arian told The Times this week he was once confronted with 14 ambulances lined up outside his hospital in Coventry, central England.
“I had to open up each ambulance and look inside and decide which patient could come in because we only had two beds,” he said.
“They were all suffering, they should all have had a bed. The NHS is under such stress that we’re being asked to do things that we shouldn’t be doing.”
Ambulance workers, who launched a first round of strike action in December and are expected to walk out again in the coming weeks, blame the situation on delays on admissions outside A&E.
The government attributes the difficulties to the effects of the pandemic but an increase in excess deaths last year have also been partly blamed on the staffing crisis.
(FRANCE 24 with AP, AFP)
