STRIKING nurses are marching on Downing Street today, leaving UCLH (University College London Hospital) at 2.30pm, as nursing staff go on strike in what the RCN described yesterday as its ‘most widespread protest so far against unfair pay and unsafe staffing’.
The RCN is striking today and tomorrow and has also announced that members in England and Wales will walk out on 6th and 7th February following the refusal of the UK and Welsh governments to seriously negotiate on the current year’s NHS pay deal.
Pat Cullen, General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said yesterday: ‘It won’t take me long to give an update on negotiations because there aren’t any. We have had no progress at all with negotiations. This government is currently refusing to negotiate with the Royal College of Nursing.
‘The government has neither formally nor informally put any offers to the Royal College of Nursing. At the last meeting last week the focus was on asking “if you as a college can help us find efficiencies or increase productivity then perhaps maybe there could be a case made to the Treasury”.
‘Well that’s very difficult to do. Of course in any organisation such as the NHS you are always looking to see how you can efficiently do things better for patients and for staff. But it’s very difficult for us as a profession to understand what efficiencies can be got from 47,000 missing nurses and then tell them to be more efficient.
‘They are working 14 hour days, well over their contracted hours. And some of those nurses are saying to me “look, we’re spinning patients like we’re spinning disks”. When you’ve got an NHS crisis like we’ve got at the minute, a nursing workforce that is feeling utterly run into the ground, a government that has turned its back on them, it’s very, very difficult to work out how you can get anything more from that workforce.
‘We hear a lot from the government about how patients are dying as a consequence of nurses striking, not turning an eye to the fact that we have 7.3 million people on waiting lists year on year completely caused by the way the NHS is being treated by this government.
‘Patients and people are not dying because nurses are striking, our nurses are striking because patients are dying.
‘We are standing up for our patients and saying enough is enough. The health service is in crisis. We need to do something about it and the way to do that is to solve the crisis in our nursing workforce. We have met a complete stonewall from this government.
‘They’re demonising nursing staff and many other workers for standing up for the people of this country.
‘They are also saying this is about minimum safe staffing levels during a strike. The NHS is in a crisis. It’s operating with minimum safe staffing levels every single day of the week.
‘And now they are threatening to punish nurses for standing up and speaking out and saying the NHS needs to be brought back from the brink. I don’t know how they are going to do this with 47,000 unfilled nursing posts.
‘And this government wants to actually start to sack nurses for asking them to sit down and start talking to them. What a shameful position to find ourselves in.’
