NHS strikes affect one in eight days as flu rates soar

NHS STRIKES will have affected one in every eight days at hospitals over the past year by the time junior doctors finish their latest round of strikes.

Doctors are set to begin a five-day walkout tomorrow, bringing the total number of days disrupted by industrial action to 44.

When the strike ends on Thursday, junior doctors will have been on picket lines for 12.5 per cent of the past year, having first gone on strike on March 13 2023.

Prof Sir Stephen Powis, the NHS national medical director, said 12 months of strikes had left “a huge impact on services, patients, their families and staff ”.

He said the latest round of strikes presented an “enormous challenge” and comes as “bed capacity is constrained, with more patients in hospital than this time last year”, including for flu.

There were more than 2,200 people in hospital with flu last week, four times higher than at this time last year.

Junior doctors staged a record sixday walkout at the start of January, with at least 23,000 staff absent each weekday, causing more than 113,000 hospital appointments and procedures to be cancelled.

The latest round of strikes will end at 11.59pm on Feb 28 because the doctors’ union’s six-month mandate for strike action comes to an end.

The British Medical Association (BMA) is balloting members to extend its mandate for a further six months, having secured it twice in the past year with a substantial majority.

Junior doctors are demanding a pay rise of 35 per cent, but say they would accept it over several years.