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NHS strikers are fighting for all of us
Ambulance staff are out on strike on January 11 and once again they are calling on the entire labour movement and the general public to support them in their struggle to save universal healthcare, writes HELEN O’CONNOR
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EVERY week 500 patients are dying due to a shortage of NHS beds and front-line staff, according to the latest estimates.
The vacancy rate across the NHS professions is now running at 130,000, as exhausted, demoralised staff leave the service for good.
It is simply not possible to deliver safe and effective care and treatment to patients under the conditions the mass staffing exodus creates, and ambulance staff know this better than most.
Patients are suffering the impact of years of penny-pinching around the wages, terms and conditions for the staff delivering services.
Paramedics are forced to tend to frail patients in the backs of draughty vehicles and work hours of free overtime because they can’t transfer these patients into hospitals due to horrendous backlogs.
Bed occupancy levels are at 93.2 per cent, which means there is no capacity in the system to deal with any additional demand on the NHS. This is leading to ambulances queuing up outside accident and emergency for hours.
Then ambulance crews have to suffer the psychological trauma of being unable to get to other casualties on time and those casualties could be anyone’s partner, child, parent or grandparent.
NHS campaigners and trade union activists have been warning about the storm developing in the NHS for a long time.
Young patients who could be saved by skilled and experienced paramedics are now dying, but instead of taking what is a national and humanitarian emergency seriously, this Tory government and its friends holding the purse-strings in NHS trusts are forging ahead with an agenda of cuts and privatisation which utterly disregards the health needs of the population.
Health unions know the money is available to settle the NHS disputes fully by meeting the reasonable demands of our members.
Indeed, funding the wages, terms and conditions of existing ambulance staff to retain them in the service would be a good way for the government to signal that it is taking the NHS emergency seriously.
After all, billions were handed over to private companies during the pandemic for solutions that ultimately failed the country.
What this wasteful spending revealed is that when the political will is there, the cash flows easily.
While the NHS is falling into the deepest and most dangerous crisis we have ever seen in this country, elective surgery is being outsourced by stealth to private hospitals to the tune of billions.
Instead of enriching the fat cats, this government could make a different choice and requisition beds and staff from the private sector in order to save lives.
It could choose to pay existing NHS staff properly in order to stem the unsustainable recruitment and retention crisis.
Patients don’t have to die at a rate of 500 a week. The solutions to the NHS crisis are within the grasp of the government and it should start by listening to the real experts, the representatives of the NHS and ambulance staff who deliver services to patients day in and day out.
Ambulance staff don’t want to strike, but they are desperate for the government to speak to their union leaders and solve the health emergency.
This battle is not simply a question of NHS staff being paid a bit more so that they don’t have to endure living in poverty.
NHS strikers are shining a light on what is going on behind the scenes in the NHS.
They are raising public consciousness and most importantly of all, they are putting pressure on the government to use available solutions to halt and reverse the collapse of the NHS.
During the last ambulance strike the public showed a stunning level of solidarity and support for our members and we expect this to happen again next week.
We hope that eventually absolutely everyone will see through the smokescreens and recognise that the privatisation that has wrecked the NHS is not a solution to this crisis.
We have all benefited from free healthcare in this country, so we must stand with the NHS strikers to ensure that patients and the public can continue to access free, safe and effective NHS care and treatment.
Helen O’Connor is a trade union organiser and former nurse. Follow her on Twitter @HelenOConnorNHS.
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