“LIFE-and-limb cover” will be provided across the ambulance service in England and Wales today to ensure patients are not put at risk during strikes, a union leader told MPs today.
GMB national secretary Rachel Harrison said that unions had been working “round the clock” to ensure there were enough strike exemptions to keep critical services running.
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“Life-and-limb cover will be provided,” Ms Harrison told MPs. “The last thing that our members want to do is put patients in harm’s way.
“We will do everything within our power to ensure that communities are safe during this action.
“The government has to play their part, they have to come to the table and talk to us.”
She told MPs that ambulance workers have been forced to take strike action after raising concerns for years about ambulance delays and unsafe conditions for patients.
Thousands of ambulance workers and other NHS staff are to strike across England and Wales on 21 December in a dispute over pay, unions have announced, as the wave of industrial action planned for the winter builds.
The GMB, Unison and Unite unions are coordinating industrial action across England and Wales after accusing the government of ignoring pleas for a decent wage rise.
The strike will happen a day after members of the Royal College of Nursing stage their second walkout, also over pay.
The GMB said more than 10,000 ambulance workers across nine trusts in England and Wales would strike including the South West, South East Coast, North West, South Central, North East, East Midlands, West Midlands, Welsh and Yorkshire ambulance services.
Paramedics, emergency care assistants, call handlers and other staff will also walk out on 28 December.
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The Unite general secretary, Sharon Graham, said: “Make no mistake, we are now in the fight of our lives for the very NHS itself. These strikes are a stark warning – our members are taking a stand to save our NHS from this government.
“Patients’ lives are already at risk but this government is sitting on the sidelines, dodging its responsibility to sort out the crisis that it has created.
The first-ever national strikes of NHS nurses will take place on 15 and 20 December, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has announced.
The RCN, whose members made history by voting for direct action across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, has accused the government of “choosing strike action” by refusing to negotiate on pay.
Other health unions, meanwhile, continue to ballot their members across both England and Wales, while strike mandates have been achieved across Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Direct action will now take place in all corners of the NHS, including ambulance services. These ballot results are evidence that there has been a dramatic shift in mood among health workers over the last year.
We hear reports of the NHS in crisis, hospitals running at capacity and dangerously low staffing levels. But without working within these services, it’s impossible to truly understand what this looks like for staff, and the patients these staff are doing their best to care for.
What staff are witnessing first hand is a catastrophic breakdown of services that has left us with vacancies hitting 135,000 and patients in danger. We desperately need to focus on retention of staff: without addressing that, we have no chance of tackling the backlog of seven million patients. Sadly, neither the government or opposition ever bring retention into the conversation, because that would mean putting pay restoration on the agenda.
In a recent survey by the GMB union, one in three ambulance staff said they had been involved in a delay that had resulted in a person dying. This is a terrifying statistic, and just one of many that the government should be taking far more seriously.
Staff are not prepared to stand with their hands behind their backs while the NHS is ripped apart in front of our eyes
What we are now witnessing are increasingly extreme attacks from the right-wing press and commentators attempting to demonise us, and to guilt us into abandoning our fight for what we are owed.
However, as I commented to a colleague, nothing they can say about us will be as bad as what staff are witnessing day in, day out. Things cannot continue as they are, and staff are not prepared to stand with their hands behind their backs while the NHS is ripped apart in front of our eyes.
I have worked as an NHS nurse for 15 years. I love my job. But my pay, and that of my colleagues, has been deliberately eroded for over a decade, with some workers up to 29% worse off in real terms. What we are left with is a group of workers carrying the entire burden of keeping patients safe, while the government washes its hands of any responsibility or accountability for the state of the service within which they work.
These are the staff who find themselves skipping breaks, working overtime for free, selling back their annual leave to make ends meet, sleeping in their cars as they cannot afford fuel to and from work – and ultimately quitting, as the moral injury of delivering substandard care is not sustainable.
We should all be united in our outrage. While this is an industrial dispute about pay, the fight is about so much more. During the pandemic we witnessed the devastating impact of dramatically increased demand on an NHS that has been stripped to the bone. We cannot let this happen again.
This is why we are taking our fight to this government and standing up not only for ourselves, but for our families and communities, and for the future of the NHS. So when the time comes, and it will, please join NHS staff on the picket lines.
Without action now, there will be no NHS left to fight for.
Raiding the NHS budget or scrapping plans to rebuild crumbling hospitals would plunge the health service into its deepest crisis in decades. This was the stark warning this weekend from Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, who said the government is “living in a fantasy land” if it believes it can cut funds to the NHS without endangering patients.
Jeremy Hunt promised spending cuts of “eye-watering difficulty” last week after becoming chancellor of the exchequer. Yet he also did not reverse his predecessor Kwasi Kwarteng’s decision to scrap the £7bn health and social levy that had been earmarked for the NHS.
Taylor, whose organisation represents hospitals, ambulance trusts, mental health care, community care and GP services, said his members were issuing the “starkest warning” about “the huge and growing gulf between what the NHS is being asked to deliver and the funding and capacity it has available”.
Coronavirus UK is a big issue so there will be a series of posts. I intend to explain in some detail why UK is pursuing it’s current course (essentially the NHS is totally overwhelmed so the purpose is to reduce infection as far as possible), how the Coronavirus crisis is also a crisis for Capitalism (and compare and contrast to the previous crisis of Capitalism 2008). Hopefully people are realising that good health and an adequately funded and otherwise properly resourced health system is of paramount importance.
One issue to note now: Official guidance to wash hands often is simplified. The reason behind it is that viruses spread through fomites – objects that are shared by people. The obvious ones I can think of are shared rails and handles on public transport, buttons on intercoms, elevators, entry or exit to blocks of flats, handles on supermarket baskets and trolleys. It is suggested that Coronavirus / Covid-19 can remain viable on metal and wood fomites for up to 48 hours.
