No ambulance worker wants to strike. They’re being forced to take this desperate measure because the Government’s let the NHS get into such a dire state.
If NHS employees don’t take a stand over pay and staffing, more patients will die waiting for emergency care and those with minor conditions get sicker.
Each day, the situation becomes more dangerous as resources are stretched to breaking point. Low pay across the NHS is fuelling a growing staffing crisis.
Vacancies are at an all-time high and the number of patients awaiting treatment is at record levels too. While the health service remains so short of staff, the experience of patients won’t improve.
Caring is in the DNA of ambulance staff and their NHS colleagues. They want to save lives, but many can no longer do the jobs they love properly.
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Viewers of the BBC documentary ‘Ambulance’ will know all too well the overwhelming pressures faced.
At the end of each shift, staff feel immense guilt at being unable to provide the care they wanted to give.
Crews increasingly face the torment of ‘what if?’. Perhaps the person needing critical support might have lived if the ambulance had reached them soon enough.
Ambulances are queuing outside A&E departments for hours and hours on end leaving crews unable to respond to other 999 calls.
Emergency vehicles have become overflow A&E waiting rooms. Ambulance staff starting their morning shifts are heading straight to hospital to relieve colleagues who’ve been waiting there all night, unable to hand over their patients.
Call handlers are lying awake at night, unable to sleep for fear the person who had called needing an ambulance before they went off shift, will still be waiting for one when they return in the morning.
Staff with decades of experience say they’ve never seen things so bad.
Patients face long waits in ambulances or corridors while hospitals struggle to find beds on understaffed wards. The social care crisis means patients who are well enough to leave can’t be discharged back into the community.
Better pay isn’t the only solution to all the problems facing the ambulance service and the wider NHS. But a fair wage could persuade staff to stay and others to join – and that would mean a safer service.
Strikes are always a last resort and will inevitably have an impact. But health workers have reluctantly reached the conclusion that short-term disruption is necessary if the government is to be forced to act.
A solution to the dispute is possible. In Scotland, talking to unions rather than demonising them has led to improved offers of pay and strikes being paused. Ministers in Westminster could do well to take a leaf out of Holyrood’s book.
Instead of upping the ante with talk of COBRA and the army, ministers should be concentrating all their efforts on ending the disputes.
Steve Barclay, Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak need to show they value NHS staff by investing in them with higher wages to help the NHS get back on track. That starts with holding pay talks that could put an end to a dispute no one wants to see.