An NHS England director has urged regional leaders to do their best not to cancel hospital appointments and operations when NHS workers go on strike next month, in the hope of reducing the risk to patients’ safety.
For the first time, tens of thousands of nurses in cancer wards, A&E departments and intensive care units in England will stop work for 48 hours from 1 March – marking a significant escalation in the dispute over pay and working conditions.
In a letter seen by the Guardian, Stephen Groves, the director of resilience at NHS England, has urged the leaders of NHS trusts across the country to do everything possible to avoid cancelling elective care procedures.
At least 88,000 appointments were cancelled because of the strikes by nurses and ambulance staff in December and January, figures revealed.
“Organisations should also make every possible effort to continue elective care for patients. Rescheduling of appointments should only happen when absolutely necessary and be undertaken in consultation with your Integrated Care Board and your regional Performance Director,” Groves wrote.
He asked all NHS trusts to provide a brief assessment of how the strikes may affect their services, including mental health and community trusts, by midday on Monday.
Unison has announced that a further 12,000 ambulance workers would be able to join 35,000 of their colleagues and tens of thousands more nurses in strike action.
A Conservative former cabinet minister was among those to call for the prime minister to negotiate with unions planning action over real-terms pay cuts caused by soaring inflation.
On Sunday, Prof Philip Banfield, the BMA chair of council, said that the prime minister and the health secretary, Steve Barclay, were on the verge of making a historic mistake over their stance on strikes by healthcare staff.
Speaking at a young doctors’ conference in Bristol, the BMA’s most senior doctor, who is also a consultant gynaecologist and obstetrician, said that by refusing to enter meaningful negotiations with trade unions, the government was guaranteeing escalation. He added that the assumption that the government could “stay silent and wait it out” was reckless.
Banfield also said that junior doctors – many of whom have been balloted for strike action, with the result announced on Monday – deserved better, adding that the government was letting down patients. He said all NHS staff were “standing up for our patients in a system that seems to have forgotten that valuing staff and their wellbeing is directly linked to patient safety and better outcomes of care”.
Banfield also criticised the empty promises of a “conveyer belt” of prime ministers, saying they have been “cutting [the NHS] to the bone and sucking out the marrow to boot”. Staff vacancies and patient demand were soaring, Banfield said, yet bed numbers – and funding – were down.
“Doctors have never experienced so much stress, so much moral injury from not being able to undertake the care that they’re so desperate to give,” he said. “This government, with its silence and disregard for our highly skilled and expert workforce, is consciously and deliberately overseeing the demise of the NHS at a point when it is needed most.”
However, government ministers have pushed back, with the Conservative MP and leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt, telling Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday, hosted by Trevor Phillips, that the only people who benefit from strikes were the Labour party.
“It’s a myth that strikes are helpful. They’re not. They exacerbate financial problems for the very people going out on strike and they also are going to have a knock-on effect on cancelled appointments, on missed education,” Mordaunt said.
“The only thing that is going to enable us to make progress on the genuine issues that certain sectors are facing is discussions.”
While the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, who was also on the programme, refused to say whether the Labour party in Westminster would match healthcare proposals made by the party in Wales, where it controls the NHS as the party in government, and by the Labour party in Scotland, she said negotiations were key.
“Of course you don’t conduct those negotiations in public or on television,” Cooper said.
The Department for Health and Social Care has been approached for comment.
