Striking NHS workers have cause to resent government failure to fix a broken system

SIR – While the NHS workers who are planning to strike (Leading Article, December 4) may have a justifiable case for a significant pay rise, I suspect it is the daily battle against the shortages, delays and lack of resources on the front line that is the real grievance.

We have an NHS that is top-heavy with administrators on six-figure salaries while there is a shortage of beds, nurses and doctors. There is continued reporting about delays, waiting lists and their often tragic outcomes, yet there is a deafening silence from the Government regarding solutions.

When is the Government going to tackle what is probably the most significant organisation in the lives of the vast majority of the population? It is clearly not fit for purpose as it stands and requires reform from top to bottom.

A redistribution of pay from the top of the organisation to the front-line workers would be a start.

David Garnett

Northwich, Cheshire

SIR – After 40 years of working in the NHS, both as a GP and within the hospital environment, I was thinking about the single most important thing that makes me look forward to going to work every day.

The answer, in my case, is being part of a cohesive team of people who are consistently working together and who can even have some fun along the way. The ability to do this has been steadily eroded, mainly because of imposed management policies, divorced from the realities of everyday medical practice and without input from clinicians.

Organisations, whether small or large, need to consider the natural human need for well-functioning teams to prevent low morale and the constant churn of personnel.

An example where this concept might be useful, in the realm of nursing, is to return to the apprenticeship model of training.

In this model the person is immediately part of a team doing real work, and will also receive a salary for doing it. A useful consequence of this would be the instant resolution of the nursing workforce crisis, and significant a reduction in the costs of training for student nurses.

Dr Mark Vorster

Weston, Hertfordshire

SIR – Whatever the rights and wrongs of the nurses’ pay claim (report, December 8), it can surely never be right to go on strike at the risk of endangering life.

Yes, nurses have a right to strike, but they also have a responsibility to care for and save the lives of their patients. Surely that responsibility trumps any pay claim.

Mark Calvin

Tretower, Brecknockshire

SIR – Many pharmacists in hospitals, GP surgeries and on the high street have prescribed medicines, including antibiotics, to patients safely for many years, so ministers’ proposals to ask them to help during NHS strikes are not entirely new (“Pharmacies drafted in to break NHS strike”, report, December 4) .

Furthermore, new standards of education mean that by 2026 all pharmacists will be prescribers at the point of registration, heralding a sea-change in the way all pharmacists will be able to care for patients.

However, like every other healthcare profession, pharmacy teams are under severe pressure already. If the Government wants all community pharmacy teams to help ease winter pressures through a new core service, it must provide the funding and workforce plan for it to be delivered.

The role of a pharmacist is not the same as that of a doctor or a nurse, so it is hard to see how a pharmacist carrying out their professional role could be described as “strikebreaking”.

Professor Claire Anderson President, Royal Pharmaceutical Society

London E1