NHS staff need pay rises, not lectures on ‘working harder’

The notion that NHS staff need to "work harder" to alleviate the mounting pressure and justify pay increases is not only misguided, but deeply unfair. Doctors and nurses are already working incredibly hard, often to the point of exhaustion, and are not being given the resources and support they need to do their jobs effectively.

Instead of placing blame on the dedicated staff, we should be calling on the government to provide the necessary funding and resources for the NHS. This includes offering pay deals that reflect the demands of the job. Not doing this risks further alienating staff who are already leaving en masse.

The government must avoid a vicious cycle of staff losses compounding the conditions in which we work.

Dr Matt Kneale Co-chair, Doctors’ Association UK

It’s unfair of the government to demand NHS staff work harder to “justify” more pay when they are already working their socks off.

That wasn’t required of MPs when they got a pay rise of £2,200 in March. Admittedly, many of them do work hard – particularly those who haven’t safe seats. But others don’t seem at all hardpressed given, as reported by The Independent on Monday, they can spare the time to do outside jobs earning them £17.1m since 2019.

Roger Hinds Surrey

Front-door social care

Responding to the delayed discharge crisis facing the NHS by transferring thousands of elderly and vulnerable patients into care homes, may only end up throwing petrol on an already blazing fire.

The government ignores the fact that many of these delayed patients are desperate to go home – not into residential settings, often themselves vectors of respiratory infections, as we saw during the Covid pandemic. But either due to an acute shortage of staff or councils starved of proper funding, for the past decade, home care support – including domiciliary and adaptations – is simply not available on the scale needed.

Indeed, with nearly half a million adults already awaiting community assessments for care, as well as the pressures from the NHS block booking residential beds without addressing the near 165,000 vacancies in social care, or plugging the funding gap care homes need to stay open, this will only add more stress to an already broken system.

Instead of focusing on backdoor solutions, a more front-door approach to avoiding hospital admissions on a national scale is required, rather than just “sticking-plaster” approaches. Good preventative home care practice examples exist across the country, but are invariably run on stop-start funding streams with insufficient thought or resources available long-term to roll out the more successful ones nationally.

Sadly, if the £250m promised ever reaches its intended destinations before winter ends its impact will be about as effective as the 40 “new” hospitals Johnson promised the country in 2019.

Paul Dolan Cheshire

Once again, the government panics and thinks that a rushed solution will at least placate the electorate, even if it does nothing to address the root problem in the care sector.

What they are not prepared to admit is that the staffing shortage is largely down to two factors; firstly, lack of staff from the EU

after Brexit; and secondly, as a result of not allowing immigrants from other areas of the world to work until they have passed through the much delayed and bureaucratic processing system.

Additionally, of course, people can obtain less demanding work in other sectors and at the same time boost their earnings. The care sector is unable to pay better salaries mostly as a result of unrealistic funding from central government but also as result of a privatised system more interested in turning a profit than providing an adequate service.

David Felton Cheshire

Royal spotlight

I wonder how many readers like me sigh as yet another front page is devoted to Prince Harry. We all understand that, like his brother, he suffered considerable trauma when his mother died. He also has the “younger brother” problem, magnified in his case because of his royal status.

However, it is now becoming increasingly difficult to feel any sympathy with either him or Meghan, given that they are part of such a privileged elite. Whilst they were certainly right to highlight and decry racist behaviour (perhaps a reflection of the whole of the UK), the constant airing of these grievances from the other side of the Atlantic is unhelpful. It’s not as though the US has a glowing reputation when it comes to racial bias!

His relationship with the media is understandably difficult, as it is with the rest of the royal family. However, far from seeking privacy, he is actively turning the spotlight on himself – and let’s not forget, receiving large amounts of money for doing so.

I can’t help feeling that the best thing media organisations can do is to remove the spotlight. The world has more important problems right now!

Lynda Newbery Bristol

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