‘The NHS isn’t failing, it’s being failed. What an appalling act of state vandalism’
Public satisfaction with the NHS is at its lowest ever level, plunging for the first time in the 41-year history of the survey to show less than a quarter of people are satisfied with the way the health service is currently running.
Compared to 2010 when 70% of the public were satisfied with the NHS, the latest survey findings lay bare what 14 years of a Tory government stripping funds and resources from the NHS has had.
Campaign group Keep Our NHS Public has called it “an appalling act of state vandalism” commenting that the NHS “isn’t failing, it’s being failed”.
NHS workers have expressed heartbreak over the shocking decline in public satisfaction for the service under the Tories while unions have called for immediate action to address the staffing crisis.
One palliative care doctor wrote on X: “14 years of Tory government understaffing, underfunding & private sector outsourcing have trashed the NHS into a travesty of the service we want to give you.
Royal College of Nursing (RCN) chief executive Pat Cullen joins RCN members on the picket line outside University College Hospital, London, January 19, 2023
RISHI SUNAK came under blistering attack today after falsely claiming that nurses had “reached a resolution” on their pay dispute.
The Prime Minster made his false claim on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, forgetting that a 5 per cent pay rise was forced on them last year.
Nurses’ union the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) exposed the falsehood and reminded Mr Sunak that he “never reached a pay resolution with nursing staff in the NHS — our members rejected his pay offer and we remain in dispute.”
RCN general secretary and chief executive Pat Cullen accused the PM of “forgetting basic facts.”
She said: “The government needs to get its act together — it must offer nursing staff a far better pay offer this year.
“Just this week, nursing staff in Northern Ireland announced they will be taking to picket lines over pay.”
STRIKING nurses outside St Thomas’s hospital in London said today that they felt the government has treated NHS staff with “contempt” and “does not care” about them or their patients.
Jane, who was on the picket line outside the busy London hospital, condemned ministers for failing to engage in talks with nurses’ union RCN.
“I just feel like they seem so distant from us, from what we’re going through, that they are contemptuous of us and that they don’t care … and by extension they don’t care about our patients either,” she told the Star.
The London-based nurse, who has worked in the NHS for three years and did not want to give her surname, said that she had joined the picket because chronic staff shortages mean “we can’t look after our patients safely.”
The prime minister Rishi Sunak has argued the RCN’s inflation-busting pay claim is “unaffordable”.
However, the former leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn has summed up why this is palpably untrue. He tweeted, “The cost of meeting nurses’ demand for an inflation-busting pay rise: £1.6 billion. The cost of Rishi Sunak’s bank tax giveaways: £7.3 billion. If we can afford handouts for the rich, we can afford to meet the basic needs of those who keep this country afloat.”
While the government is content to give tax breaks and handouts to the mega-rich, they’re leaving the people who keep the NHS running to chose between heating and eating.
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.
