the government’s ongoing strike They are as popular as “a cup of cold medicine” in the health service, says the chairman of the health service National Health Insurance System alliance.
Lord Victor Adebowale, chairman of the NHS Union, told BBC Question Time Time to make a proper plan salary increase Aims to help the health service emerge from the crisis it has fallen into.
Nurse, ambulance driver and potential junior doctor are fighting back low public sector wages – exist cost of living crisis, inflation and looming economic recession – and their harsh working conditions.
Adebowale said the time had passed for the government to actually act, saying: “I was in the hospital the other day – if I went to the nurses, they were taking care of people in the corridors and saying, ‘You know what we need right now is reform, ‘Yes, it’s as popular as a cup of cold medicine.
The only way to move forward, he said, was to start by acknowledging that “we’re in a crisis right now, people are on strike and the government needs to sit down and negotiate.”
Hearing this suggestion, the audience burst into warm applause. The government has mostly refused to intervene in any pay negotiations between public sector workers and their employers.
Adebowale continued: “We need a proper workforce plan, and by that we mean a long-term workforce plan, so that we know how many nurses we need now, how many nurses we’re going to need in the future, what we need to do, what they’re going to pay for.
“Third, we need to stick with the reforms we just made. Remember in July we passed a bill creating an integrated care system with broad cross-party support, population healththey are just getting started.
“We need to start creating healthy communities so we need less hospitals – my members will love that.”
So far, the government has proposed one-time payment NHS staff.
The NHS was one of the hot topics of the day Question Time This week amid ongoing strikes and concerns over its general future.
A nurse mother who spoke to the audience said most of her daughter’s contemporaries had chosen not to stay in the NHS and had moved abroad.
She said they were “tired of the stress, tired of agency workers who don’t show up and get dumped all the time”.
The audience continued: “Nobody ever talks much about the morale of NHS staff.
“But that’s a major problem, they’re in nursing, not for the high pay, [but because] They want to make a difference, but they can’t because they don’t have enough employees. “
Nursing vacancies “have been going on for years” and “successive governments have struggled for years” because of its high cost, she added.
“We have to decide – do we want the NHS? Because that’s what’s going to happen.”
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