NHS strikes should be addressed, but striking staff need to be reasonable about their demands ✍️ annemcelvoy
Like it or not, a high settlement would take funding away from the frontline care of patients, and that trade-off is one the Government will have to level with voters about in the new year as the pressure to resolve the stand-off increases. Money that flows into pay in inflationary times is not available for health and social care budgets.
The underlying tension here however is that a wasted decade of NHS reform was patchily addressed by governments who found themselves sidetracked and the issue in the “too difficult” box.
Realistically, a deal to end strikes will be a patching exercise and the Government’s focus will remain on the need to clear a terrifying backlog of cases and undiagnosed serious illnesses from the days when the NHS became mainly the “Covid service”. That haunts it today, in terms of. When a pay deal does come, it will need to move further to acknowledging that real-term wages have been falling and economic strains are likely to be punitive for lower – to medium earners until 2024.
But they are also the sign of a system built on a public-sector balance of pay and pensions which needs an overhaul and in which incentives for the most committed workers to learn – and earn – are not always well aligned in practice. Failure to address this means the only certain outcome will be more chronic misalignment between what we want of a healthcare system with a great past – and a future that demands an urgent rethink, as well as a done deal.
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