NHS and health

Covid: isolation pay, ventilation, PPE, testing still needed!

Under the guise of “Living with Covid”, and at a time when a new variant (how consequential, no-one knows) is spreading, NHS England has watered down its already inadequate infection prevention and control (IPC) advice. This puts both NHS workers and patients at unnecessary risk of harm and undermines the public health effort. Far from learning the lessons of the pandemic, NHS managers are reverting to the pre-Covid status quo. For the first few years of the pandemic, NHS England advised that Trusts should ensure that all workers, including bank and subcontracted workers, could isolate on full...

Doctors step up pay action

On 20 September, junior doctors and consultants will strike together for the first time in the history of the NHS, in a significant escalation of their pay disputes. NHS consultants strike 19-20 September; junior doctors 20-22 September; and consultants and junior doctors together 2-4 October, plus radiographers on 3 October. (For picket lines, see here ). The British Medical Association has also called a rally in Manchester on 3 October outside Tory party conference. The government continues to say the doctors’ demand for “pay restoration” — an above-inflation pay rise this year, and a...

Unite strikes for NHS pay and staffing

Thousands of NHS workers across East London struck for pay and safer staffing on 13-14 September. The Barts Unite branch has further dates from 16-21 September, coinciding with national walkouts of junior doctors and consultants. On both 13 and 14 September lively rallies made the explicit links between our industrial demands and the fight to save the NHS. The Unite union has a patchy membership across the NHS. It has patchy areas of density for historic reason, either because of past campaigns or because of the way the Unite union formed through mergers with smaller unions and professional...

Health workers strike for re-banding

Clinical support workers in Unison at Arrowe Park and Clatterbridge hospitals on the Wirral struck for another 72 hours on 11-13 September, with a claim for re-banding back pay. A number of trusts including Manchester University Foundation, Pennine Care and Stockport NHS Foundation, have re-banded their Cases and Health Care Assistants from Band 2 to 3 and paid back pay to 1 April 2018. This dispute is to win the same for workers on the Wirral. Strikes this week have been well supported and the picket line has been lively. More strike days are planned. Organisers are making sure the workers...

Notes from Berlin: what we can learn from the hospital movement

In September 2021 thousands of healthworkers launched an indefinite strike at Charité and Vivantes, two of Berlin’s large municipal hospitals. So began the Krankenhausbewegung - Berlin’s Hospital Movement. After a month, they won. A year later, nurses in the UK underwent their own industrial awakening, as the Royal College of Nursing balloted for nationwide strike action over pay. The differences between the disputes could not have been more stark, as a series of obstacles — some erected by anti-union laws, others by their own union — combined to defeat the UK nurses, despite overwhelming...

Support doctors' pay fight

Doctors, members of the British Medical Association (BMA), are demonstrating more fight over pay than most public-sector workers. Both to show determined action can win workers real improvements, and to shore up our tottering health service, their fight demands active support. BMA junior doctors in England struck again on 11-15 August for “pay restoration” to real-terms 2008 levels; they are now reballoting under the anti-union laws for further strikes (till 31 August). Consultants (senior doctors) in England struck on 20-22 July and will strike against 24-26 August. Join the picket lines at...

Doctors strike in August

British Medical Association junior doctors will strike again 11-15 August and consultants (senior doctors) probably on the 24th and 25th, demanding real-terms pay rises as steps towards “pay restoration”. There are also rumblings about a possible GPs’ strike. NHS radiographers, who have their own union, struck on 25 and 26 July — their first ever national strike — and may strike again. Junior doctors, who make up about half the hospital doctor workforce (consultants are 40%), have already struck for 13 days since March. As socialist junior doctors have argued in Solidarity , however, the...

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