Healthcare professionals are in high demand. The UK currently has low unemployment. Vacancies in the health sector are high and growing. But working for the NHS is becoming less and less attractive, as pay falls further behind the private sector. Cost of living pressures are hitting hard The Office for National Statistics says that public sector
Read our letter to Rishi Sunak on behalf of all NHS staff
Today, nurses in the Royal College of Nursing walk out in their first ever nationwide strike. In the coming weeks, they will be followed by many other staff from a further five NHS unions who have voted for industrial action so far, including Unison, Unite, GMB, the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy and the Royal College
Pay a visit to Health Secretary Steve Barclay’s Twitter feed and you’ll find graphics trumpeting increased funding to the NHS. It’s obvious why he’d boast about it. Polls consistently show huge majorities of the public in favour of putting more money into the health service. A great return on investment It’s not just smart politics
Are you on an NHS waiting list? With one in eight people in England now waiting for treatment and the backlog still growing, more and more of us can expect to get stuck in the queue for care. It’s not just waiting lists that are breaking records. The number of vacancies across the NHS in
This week the government have finally announced the pay award for NHS staff. It comes a full 109 days after it was due. And well short of what was needed. A missed chance to save the NHS Ministers have missed a chance to invest in the future, and start to turn the NHS around. They’ve
The government has announced (19 July) a flat rate pay increase of £1400 for NHS staff in England, backdated to 1st April. Those at the top of band 6 and all of band 7 will receive a slightly higher amount, equivalent to 4%. With inflation at 9.4% in the year to June, the award equates
If the media has agreed on one thing over recent weeks it’s this: more strikes are coming. Record inflation is squeezing the pay of public sector workers, whose wages have been held down for a decade. Meanwhile, government ministers are urging ‘pay restraint’ (translation: real-terms pay cuts), swimming against the tide of public opinion which
An exclusive poll run by the #WithNHSStaff campaign has revealed huge numbers of staff may quit, and widespread concerns about how staff shortages are already affecting patient care. In the survey, more than half of respondents said they had considered leaving in the last 12 months, with one in five either actively looking or already
We all know there’s a staffing crisis in the NHS. But what does that really mean? Figures published in March showed there are now 110,000 vacancies across the NHS in England. That’s about one in every 10 posts. Rising workload, stress and burnout Obviously, that makes things a lot harder for the staff who are