NHS pay dispute could cause serious long-term harm, says health boss

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The NHS faces “serious and significant” long-term damage unless the increasingly bitter pay battle between staff and ministers is resolved soon, a senior health service boss has said.

The growing wave of strikes will hamper the NHS’s efforts to tackle the growing chaos in A&E and the 7.2 million-strong backlog of people needing hospital treatment, Sir Julian Hartley said.

His warning came as physiotherapists in England stage a walkout over pay for the first time.

Hartley is the outgoing chief executive of the Leeds teaching hospitals NHS acute care trust, and next week will take over as chief executive of the hospitals lobby group NHS Providers.

“The long-term implications for strike action as the NHS attempts to recover from Covid are serious and significant,” he said on Newcross Healthcare’s Voices of Care podcast.

“We need to see a speedy resolution to the industrial action. The consequences for the NHS if it continues indefinitely are serious, particularly in terms of the challenges that we’re already facing in the urgent care pathway with the issues with ambulance attendances, handovers, crowded EDs [emergency departments] and also, of course, the concomitant social care challenge.

“And then the second big issue is, of course, the recovery in terms of operations that will be cancelled when we’re trying to catch up with the backlog of patients that have been affected through the pandemic of not getting their care and treatment. Those are big issues that we need to see the NHS succeed on. The NHS will be seriously hampered if industrial action continues in the way that it is happening right now.”

Health unions are frustrated at the government’s refusal to increase its below-inflation ?1,400 pay award for 2022-23 or even to discuss doing so. They have announced plans to significantly expand their campaign of industrial action. For example, Unite members who work in ambulance services in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are planning 10 more strikes in February and March.

NHS leaders have made clear that they have “huge concern” over plans for nurses and ambulance staff to stage an unprecedented joint stoppage on 6 February. Unite’s general secretary, Sharon Graham, said on Monday that 6 February would be “a very bad day for the NHS”.

Hartley urged ministers to engage in meaningful talks with health unions to break the deadlock. He said: “We obviously need to have a process of negotiation. There has to be an endgame here. It can’t continue indefinitely. And if it does, there’d be serious consequences for the NHS and indeed more broadly for social care too.”

Up to 4,200 members of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy (CSP) were on strike on Thursday at 30 health trusts in England.

Claire Sullivan, the CSP’s director of employment relations, said: “Despite government claims to be open to dialogue, no new offer has been tabled and physiotherapy staff will now reluctantly take action. The government’s strategy during this dispute has been simply inexplicable and is entirely to blame for these strikes.”

About 30 striking CSP members gathered outside Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham. Greg Stretton, a 41-year-old team leader for the respiratory medicine physiotherapist service at the Nottingham university hospitals NHS trust, which runs the QMC and Nottingham city hospital, carried a sign reading “Constant Staffing Problems”.

The difficulty of recruiting physiotherapists due to the low wages they receive is a key reason behind the industrial action, the unions said. Stretton’s team should have 18 staff but usually has about 14, and at times it has dropped to as low as six despite workloads remaining high as physiotherapy services deal with the aftermath of Covid and a backlog of cancer patients.

He said: “People are just genuinely burnt out, and my team has noticed the impact of that. We were having people in our office cry on a daily basis, just from being at work and the stresses of being work amid untenable pressures, patient demands and service demands.

“It almost felt like a choice of who you let down. As team leader it was a choice of do you let down the patients by saying we need to focus on ourselves, or do we let down staff by saying our patients need us. We just don’t have the capacity to do everything.”

Steve Barclay, the health secretary, said: “It is regrettable some union members are taking industrial action. I will continue meeting with unions, including the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, to discuss what is fair and affordable for the 2023-24 pay process.”