On the picket lines of the NHS strike, The New Statesman meets the nurses and paramedics who are protesting low pay, poor conditions and years of underfunding.
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How does the NHS solve the multitude of issues facing its workforce? Over the past week tens of thousands of nurses, ambulance workers and other health and medical staff went on strike over pay and conditions.
Amid consistently-high inflation, pay will be the top priority for workers – and by extension unions. Nurses’ pay is worth less in real terms than it was in 2010 and NHS England, after receiving recommendations from the government’s independent public pay board, has offered most staff only a 4 per cent raise.
There are record backlogs – which were already at an all-time high before the pandemic, and were exacerbated by Covid-19 – in elective care; a record number of job vacancies (132,139, including 46,828 nurses); operations being cancelled because of staff shortages; and bed capacity is inadequate. All these help to explain why workers (especially a record amount of nurses) are leaving the NHS in droves.
“I’m striking because I don’t know what else to do any more,” a weary Lynda, who’s been a nurse in the NHS for over 25 years, said on a picket line.
“The creation of the NHS was a decision that was made in 1947, for the public good. The decisions to help support [and prolong] that initial choice still exists,” she added. “It’s just that the government’s choosing to ignore them. People still need the NHS. The current state of the NHS is a political choice.”
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