Pay deal will not fix broader NHS crisis
On Tuesday, the NHS Staff Council signed off on the government’s offer of a 5% pay rise for more than a million NHS staff in addition to a oneoff payment of up to £3,789, despite continuing opposition from unions including the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) and Unite, says Connie Dimsdale on inews. Pay rises will apply to all nurses, paramedics and other nonmedical NHS staff in England. The RCN will now hold a fresh ballot to renew its six-month strike mandate.
The deal did not include doctors, who are locked in separate pay disputes, notes William Atkinson on Conservative Home. The “Corbynista leadership of our junior doctors” and the British Medical Association are demanding a 35% increase for their members, a sum that is “simply unaffordable” and one that is “designed for not negotiating” – in spite of the fact that a typical junior doctor already makes £37,000 in their first year, which hardly makes them the “most hard-pressed of workers”.
Nonetheless, there’s no escaping the fact that we have a major problem, says Nora Colton in The Telegraph. A third of our doctors are emigrating to countries such as Canada and New Zealand; nurses are leaving the profession at an accelerating rate. This is not only due to falling real-term pay, but “high rates of sickness, burnout” and “harassment”. Nor can we recruit from abroad. “The UK finds itself in the middle of a global healthcare crisis”, with the world requiring 84 million health workers by 2030, up around 30% from the 64 million it had in 2020. At the same time, there are around three times more young people applying to medical school than there are places due to medical school caps. We should address our “internal obstacles to training” and fix the “mess of our medical education system”. A “comprehensive workforce plan could be the start of the path to long-term change”.