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London
CNN
–
Nurses in the United Kingdom have reached breaking point.
Up to 100,000 members of the Royal College of Nursing will walk out on Thursday across England, Wales and Northern Ireland in the first of two days of strike action this month to protest poor pay and working conditions. they The plan is to leave again on December 20. (Nurses in Scotland are negotiating a separate pay offer.)
It’s the first time In its 106-year history the RCN – the UK’s largest nursing union – has gone on strike in England. The move has been spurred by a cost-of-living crisis that has reduced the spending power of nurses nearly three years after the start of an epidemic that pushed many to their limits.
“It’s pretty unprecedented,” Billy Palmer, senior fellow at the Nuffield Trust, a health research firm, told CNN. While small pockets of nursing staff have left before, the country’s national health service “has never seen anything of this scale,” he added.
That’s partly because, for most of its history, the RCN had a “no strike” policy. In 1995, the union changed its rules, allowing strikes as long as they did not compromise patient care.
“Patient safety is always paramount,” the RCN says on its website, adding that some nursing staff will continue to work through the strike. The RCN has pledged to maintain critical services including chemotherapy and dialysis treatment during this month’s stoppage.
The nurses join thousands of other British workers who are striking this December, including rail staff, postal workers and ambulance drivers. At the heart of these disputes is wages, which have failed to keep pace with inflation, which hit a 41-year high of 11.1% in October.
It is the most comprehensive A wave of industrial unrest stemmed from the country’s infamous “Winter of Discontent” in the late 1970s, when large numbers of workers, from truck drivers to gravediggers, went on strike..
The chaos has prompted Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to warn that “tough” new laws restricting strike action are on their way.
Earlier this year, the RCN rejected the government’s offer to increase nurses’ pay by at least £1,400 ($1,707) a year. The offer increased by an average of 4.3%, well below the rate of inflation.
RCN general secretary and chief executive Pat Cullen said last month that “enough is enough. [was] Enough is enough,” and that nurses will “no longer tolerate a financial knife edge at home and a raw deal at work.”
The union says it wants a 19% pay rise A jump of 5% on inflation of 14% as measured by October’s retail price index — and for the government to fill record staff vacancies, he argues, puts patient safety at risk.
RCN knows he is optimistic, Palmer said. Nurses aren’t “really holding out” for such a raise, he said, but are using it as a starting point for negotiations.
But that demand is “unaffordable,” UK Health Secretary Steve Barclay told CNN in a statement. Each additional 1% salary increase for nursing staff will cost The government about £700 million ($854 million), he added.
Barclay said Twitter Last month it said industrial action would “inevitably” affect services, but the NHS had “tried and tested plans to minimize disruption and ensure emergency services continue”.
The dispute has its roots in earlier complaints. 360,000 nurses working for the NHS – The service’s largest professional group – has suffered from underinvestment for years, the RCN argues.
In 2010, the Conservative-led coalition government embarked on a decade of austerity to stabilize the country’s finances following the global financial crisis.
Nurses’ pay fell by 1.2% per year between 2010 and 2017, when inflation is taken into account, according to The Health Foundation, a UK charity that campaigns for better health and healthcare. His salary was frozen for the first three years of that.
Although salaries have risen in the years since, the Nuffield Trust estimates that typical nurse salaries – around £40,000 ($49,000) for experienced nurses working full-time – have fallen by around 6%. After inflation compared to a decade ago. That compares to a 0.6% rise in private sector pay over the same period.
Internationally, UK nurses’ salaries are difficult to compare, given that health care systems differ significantly between countries, but fall somewhere in the middle of a range of comparable economies, Palmer said.
“Almost any way you slice it, we’re usually in the middle [we] “Looks a little worse than Germany but a little better than France, and we certainly look worse than the Anglosphere like Australia and the United States,” he said.
It is also true of overall spending on the NHS. While the government has increased funding over the past decade, the gains have been “negligible,” according to Palmer. Once inflation and demographic changes are factored in, spending in England has risen by just 0.4% a year since 2010, Nuffield Trust data shows.
Salary is not the only problem. Nurses have also been burnt out in England with a record 47,000 vacancies.
Nuffield Trust data shows that 40,000 nurses in England, or around 11% of the total nursing workforce, left their jobs in the year to June. A similar number joined – about 45,000 – but they were not enough to fill the vacancy.
Most nurses have left to retire, but the number citing work-life balance, the second most common reason for leaving, is nearly four times higher than it was a decade ago.
And more may leave if conditions do not improve. An RCN survey of its members last December showed 57% of respondents were considering leaving. Feeling undervalued and working under too much pressure were the main reasons.
Sally Warren, policy director at The King’s Fund, a think tank, told CNN that the past decade had been “challenging” as staff numbers lagged behind demand. The pandemic only exacerbated those problems.
“[Nurses were] Someone has to manage iPad calls between people [couldn’t] He will be visited by relatives in his final hours,” Warren said. “[It was] Really emotionally draining.”
– Zahid Mahmood contributed reporting.
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