The UK National Health Service was founded on July 5, 1948.
England’s National Health Service employs 1.5 million people
According to the British organization Nuffield Trust, the NHS health workforce consists of 164,000 doctors in total and around 360,000 nurses and midwives.
Thousands of British nurses are called to strike for December 15 and 20 to ask for better wages, according to what their union said this Friday, these actions add to a winter of labor strikes that increases pressure on the health system UK state health.
The December 15 and 20 strikes are the first of possibly several strikes by NHS nurses, coming after the government refused to meet demands for raises. salaries of 5% above inflation.
“Nurses are fed up with being taken for granted, with low pay and insecure staffing levels, with not being able to give our patients the care they deserve,” said Pat Cullen, Secretary General of the Royal College of Nursing. (RCN).
Cullen commented that the government had refused to formally bargain in the two weeks since the RCN announced that nurses would go on strike for the first time in the union’s 106-year history.
British Health Secretary Steve Barclay said the nurses’ demands would amount to a 19.2% pay increase at a cost of 10 billion pounds ($12.13 billion) a year, and that the government would grant them raises. of at least 1,400 pounds each this year.
- “These are difficult times for everyone and the economic circumstances make the RCN’s demands…unaffordable,” Barclay said.
He said the NHS had plans to minimize any disruption from the strikes and ensure continuity of emergency services. The NHS, which has provided free healthcare since 1948, now deals with a record 7 million patients on waiting lists for hospital treatment.
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