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Angry nurses plan summer of protest Nurses threaten strike action unless pay curbs are eased
Mark Gould
Monday, 15 May 2017
Add to PDP Tracker Print Nurses are planning a summer of protest activity in opposition to staff shortages and pay restraint. A poll of 52,000 Royal College of Nursing (RCN) members unveiled at the RCN Congress in Liverpool has revealed that 91% of members would take industrial action short of a strike and that 78% said they would be prepared to strike.
Announcing the poll results Michael Brown, the chair of the RCN Council, said nurses had revealed "a real appetite" for industrial action.
While the turnout was not enough to mandate a formal ballot, the RCN has over 270,000 members, Mr Brown said that "getting 52,000 NHS members taking part shows the strength of feeling about pay restraint – and the percentage in favour of taking action cannot be ignored".
Congress backed Mr Brown"s emergency resolution calling for a summer of planned protest activity, followed by an industrial action ballot, should the next UK government fail to end the policy of pay restraint. Mr Brown said the union had never taken industrial action in its 100-year history, so balloting members would be a "significant step".
Mr Brown called on members to become pay champions and organise local action. During a passionate debate delegates showed overwhelming support for the resolution with just two votes against and four abstentions.
Ed Freshwater from the RCN Mental Health Forum said: “Relentless undermining has pushed us to breaking point. No more. This ends now. We’ve had the poll, let’s have the action.”
The RCN believes that current working conditions and a 1% cap on pay rises are driving people out of the profession and putting new people off entering it. In turn staffing shortages pose unacceptable risks to patient safety.
It says the total number of nurse vacancies is double what it was in 2013 – and means one in nine positions is now empty, according to the analysis by the RCN.
The Conservatives have said extra money is being invested to enable ministers to ensure patient safety is prioritised and, despite the vacancies, the number of nurses employed is still rising. Between 2010 and 2016 the number employed has risen by 2% to just over 300,000 full-time nurses.
The RCN does not dispute this, instead it looked at how many nurses NHS trusts needed to employ, but cannot. It relied on Freedom of Information requests to obtain data from all types of NHS trusts for the end of 2016 and received responses from three-quarters.
They suggested on top of the nurses employed there were another 40,000 posts unfilled across the whole health service. This equates to a vacancy rate of nearly 12% and compares with a total of 20,000 when the RCN last carried out similar research in 2013.
The RCN research found the vacancy rate was greatest in mental health services where more than 14% of posts were empty, compared with close to 8% in specialist services, such as cancer and heart hospitals.
Official figures in Scotland and Northern Ireland show a much lower vacancy rate at about 4% in each nation. Figures were not available for Wales.
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