The NHS managed to “safely keep the show on the road” during last week’s industrial action, with data showing more than 95% of planned elective activity went ahead for patients.
Published data shows the NHS exceeded its 95% goal for maintaining planned care during this round of strikes, up from 93% protected during action in July, while sustaining critical services including maternity and urgent cancer care.
Over the five days of strikes, more than 850,000 patients received the elective care they needed — about 25,000 more patients than would have been treated if activity had matched the July strike levels. This outcome reflects NHS staff working around the clock amid additional pressures such as Storm Claudia and an early rise in flu cases.
On average 17,236 resident doctors were absent each day during this round of action, slightly higher than the 16,162 average in the previous strikes. The increase partly reflects more resident doctors being rostered for work during the tougher winter months than in summer.
The industrial action followed an offer to the BMA’s resident doctors committee that was not put to members. The government’s offer would have provided more training places, extra funds to cover training costs, and improvements to working conditions, building on a 29% pay rise awarded to resident doctors over the last three years.
The NHS 10-point plan to improve resident doctors’ working lives targets key issues raised by the profession, including cutting payroll errors, reducing unnecessary repetition of training, improving annual leave processes, and ensuring access to proper rest facilities and hot food. Almost all NHS trusts (95%) now have a board director responsible for resident doctor issues and a resident doctor peer lead to ensure their concerns are heard and acted on.
Sir James Mackey, NHS chief executive, said: “This has been a monumental effort by NHS teams, and I want to thank all staff who helped to safely keep the show on the road – continuing almost all care for patients and ensuring the NHS remained open for those who needed it. But that doesn’t mean things were easy – there are still some patients who had their care disrupted, and as with every strike it takes significant time and effort from staff to manage, which otherwise would be put towards delivering more for patients and helping to get down the backlog. We must do everything we can to prevent this from continuing. It is bad for patients, bad for staff and bad for the NHS and is not representative of what all resident doctors want. I urge the BMA to work with the government and NHS as we continue to make further improvements for resident doctors.”
Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting said: “The NHS weathered the storm better than ever before and delivered tens of thousands more appointments for patients. No one wants the NHS to have to get better at dealing with strikes, but patients should rest assured that, should the BMA walk out again, the NHS team will pull together and care for as many of them as possible. There were still far too many patients who suffered because the BMA refused to put the government’s offer to its members. Polling shows that resident doctors wanted to accept the government’s offer of more jobs and better career progression. These strikes didn’t need to happen, and I hope the BMA will now get serious about resolving this dispute.”
There are 79,000 resident doctors working across the NHS. They make up half of all doctors in the NHS and typically have up to eight years’ experience working as a hospital doctor, depending on specialty, or up to three years in general practice.
