UK doctors' strikes harm patient care, data shows

The six-day strike by junior doctors in England this month caused further disruption to the National Health Service, or NHS, resulting in the cancellation of more than 113,000 incidents of patient care, data shows.

Industrial action by doctors, nurses and other workers during the last 13 months has had an extensive impact on the health service in England, which has had to reschedule more than 1.3 million appointments, said the NHS Confederation, which represents healthcare providers within the NHS structure in England.

Junior doctors, who have gone on strike for a total of 34 days in the past 10 months, have called for a pay rise significantly above inflation to address what they say is a substantial decline in their real earnings since 2008-09.

The latest strike, which ended on Jan 9, has been described as the longest in NHS history, and was the 10th that junior doctors have staged since March.

In response to NHS England data that shows more than 113,000 appointments and operations canceled because of the strike, Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said: "These figures show the mountain the NHS has to climb in order to bring the backlog down, with high winter viruses and absence levels likely to delay any kind of recovery even further.

Taylor said the confederation believes the fallout from the latest wave of industrial action will likely be felt for a long time.

"What is potentially more worrying is, we do not know how many patients avoided coming forward for care due to the strikes and what kind of backlog this could create for already overstretched services," he said. "Now, this brings the total of canceled appointments and operations in the last year to over 1.3 million, but we believe this could be a significant underestimate, because trusts have preemptively avoided making appointments during periods of industrial action, so the actual number of canceled appointments could be double this."

jonathan@mail.chinadailyuk.com