Nurses on the picket-line not the front-line
“This is a tragic day for nursing, it’s a tragic day for patients,” declared RCN boss, Pat Cullen, this morning, as up to 100,000 nurses in England, Wales and Northern Ireland from Britain’s biggest nursing union stage their first ever nationwide strike.
Today is the first of a two day-long industrial action by the Royal College of Nursing with the second strike over pay and conditions set to take place in five days’ time. Interviewed on BBC Breakfast, Cullen added: “We need to stand up for our health service, we need to find a way of addressing those over seven million people that are sitting on waiting lists, and how are we going to do that? By making sure we have got the nurses to look after our patients, not with 50,000 vacant posts, and with it increasing day by day.”
Ministers estimate that the mass action will result in 70,000 appointments, procedures and surgeries being cancelled across the NHS.
Under trade union laws, life-preserving care must be provided, meaning intensive care services, chemotherapy and dialysis will not be hit by the strike action. But routine services – including planned operations such hip replacements – will be badly affected, and thousands of cancer patients requiring scans, check-ups, radiotherapy and surgery face cancellations.
Patients who have had their operations cancelled due to strike action may have to wait six weeks for a new slot.
Critics have accused those taking to the picket line of endangering patient lives and putting a further strain on the NHS’s record elective care backlog. However, the RCN insists that poor pay and working conditions are driving nurses out of the sector and an understaffed workforce is impacting patient care on a daily basis.
At present, the likelihood of the RCN’s demands being met appears slim.
Nurses are calling for a 19% wage hike. This is considerably out of step with the average increase of 4.75% being offered to them at present. Ministers insist the current figure – recommended by the independent NHS Pay Review Body – is reasonable and that a 19% pay rise is unrealistic. Health minister, Maria Caulfield, who has also worked as nurse for over 25 years, admitted this morning that “it is difficult” living on a nurse’s wage, but added the government must balance their demands with the “reality of the funding that’s available.”
Labour has described the nursing strike as “a badge of shame for the government”, insisting pay must be on the table in future talks with the unions. However it has also branded inflation-busting pay rises across the public sector as “unaffordable.”
In Scotland, there has been a little more progress. The RCN has called off strike action in Scotland after ministers made an improved pay offer to NHS staff of a 7.5% increase, a rise on the initial 5% proposed. Two unions – Unite and Unison – have accepted this offer, the GMB has rejected it while the RCN is still consulting its members.
Yet, a fairly crucial caveat is that, in order to cover this increased pay offer for NHS staff, the Scottish government has made cuts in other areas of health spending, including primary care, mental health and Covid funds.
There is no easy solution. Yet the government cannot afford to simply dismiss nurses’ demands. Especially at a time when an ever greater number are quitting the profession, citing burnout, poor working conditions and growing frustration over pay.
As Noah Keate has written previously for Reaction, a record 40,000 nurses left the NHS workforce in the year to June 2022. This figure is equivalent to roughly one in nine nurses.
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