There is a crisis in our National Health Service (NHS).
Staff are underpaid and overworked to the point of burnout and breakdown.
Waiting lists are growing longer.
Patients and relatives are left bewildered by the tangled web of services with fancy names that promise a lot but deliver so little.
It’s got to the point where nurses are saying enough is enough because the state of the National Health Service is not their fault.
Guilt has been loaded onto individual nurses for a staffing crisis that they have not created.
Nurses in the UK have been pushed to breaking point by the government, who have delayed two paltry pay rises. Years of 0% or just over 1% pay rises mean that nurses are struggling to make ends meet.
Too many nurses are leaving the NHS because of deteriorating pay and conditions, and there is now a staggering 47,000 vacancy rate that NHS trusts are struggling to fill.
By going on strike, nurses will put responsibility for patient safety back into the hands of CEOs and government where it belongs.. They have a fighting chance to force through positive changes that will benefit themselves and patients over longer term..
The Royal College of Nurses represents 300,000 nurses who have suffered a 20% real terms pay cut since 2010.
Patricia Marquis, director for England at the RCN, says that the waiting lists will only come down when there is proper investment in the workforce.
Patrick Harrington General Secretary of Solidarity says that misbanding, bosses’ incompetence and under inflation pay rises are destroying morale in the NHS.
Sara Gorton, head of health for Unison, says that without a decent wage rise, health workers will continue to leave, and patients suffer.
Reliance on agency staff
NHS bosses are increasingly paying premium rates for agency staff to plug holes in rotas. Spending in this area rose by 20% last year to hit £3bn in England.
For many shifts, bosses have been so short-staffed they have been willing to breach the government pay caps for these agency workers, most of whom are doctors and nurses.
In a world where automation and technology are constantly evolving, the rise of robotics is inevitable. Robotics can be defined as the use of machines to automate tasks that have traditionally been done by humans.
With advancements in AI and machine learning, robots are becoming increasingly capable of performing complex tasks and making decisions on their own.
While some people may fear the rise of the robots, there are many reasons why robotics can be seen as a positive force for humanity. Here are just a few:
Waiting lists grow
Waiting lists are growing. There is a huge backlog.
The backlog in secondary care consists of the care that the NHS would normally have delivered but which was disrupted as COVID-19 impacted service delivery.
This includes patients on a waiting list for treatment who would ordinarily have been seen by now, patients who have not yet presented to their GP to seek a referral for symptoms due to concerns of burdening the health service or fears around COVID-19 infection, patients who have had procedures cancelled, referrals delayed or cancelled, and referrals refused due to lack of capacity.
It will take years to clear the backlog. The ongoing need for stringent infection prevention control measures and workforce shortages mean it will take even longer to work through as demand continues to rise.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the combination of suspension of non-urgent services and changes to individuals’ behaviour meant that the number of people joining the waiting list initially dropped.
However, this has since been rising – and despite some improvements earlier in the year, waiting times remain far higher than pre-COVID: The latest figures for September 2022 show a record high of almost 7.1 million people waiting for treatment; 2.87 million patients waiting over 18 weeks for treatment and 401537 patients waiting over a year.
Those are the numbers, but each figure represents pain and suffering. The human suffering caused by NHS waiting lists and denied operations can be immense.
People can find themselves waiting months or even years for procedures that they need, and in some cases, they may be forced to seek treatment elsewhere.
This can result in increased financial stress, decreased quality of life, and even death.
There are countless examples of people who have had to seek treatment outside of the NHS due to long waiting lists and denied operations.
In many cases, these people are forced to take on large amounts of debt or go without necessary treatment altogether.
This human suffering should not be tolerated in a country as wealthy as the United Kingdom.
The NHS must do better at meeting the needs of its patients. It’s also past time that the NHS listened to its workers and valued them with appropriate wages.
The strikers are fighting for us all. If they did nothing things would just continue on a downward spiral. We must stand behind the strikers if we want to end the crisis in the NHS.
#NursesStrike #fbnhs #FairPayforNursing #SafeStaffingSavesLives #NHS. #FBNHS
