NHS backlogs will be ‘impossible’ to bring down if there are any more strikes, health chief warns

Further strikes by NHS doctors and nurses could make it impossible to reduce the number of patients waiting the longest for surgery, a health chief warned.

Doctors in training in England have queued for four days this week as health chiefs fear nurses will reject their pay offers and stage further strikes in the coming weeks.

NHS Confederation chief executive Matthew Taylor said any further union action would make it ‘almost impossible’ for the health service to meet this year’s targets to reduce waiting lists.

The NHS has committed to eliminating 18-month waiting times for elective care, such as hip and knee surgery, by the end of this month and reducing waiting times of 65 weeks by early 2024.

It comes as the NHS elective care backlog, which includes all non-emergency procedures, passed 7.22 million yesterday, a new record.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak promised that reducing healthcare waiting lists was one of his top priorities for 2023.

As part of this, NHS England has set itself the target of eliminating waiting times of more than 18 months by the end of April this year and 65 weeks of waiting times by March 2024.

But Mr Taylor said these targets were already in jeopardy from continued strikes and could be completely destroyed if further industrial action were announced.

He told LBC that while emergency departments remained largely unaffected by the ongoing union action of young doctors, at the expense of elective surgeries,

Mr Taylor said: ‘We got through the week quite well in terms of being able to meet urgent critical care.

‘The problem is that we had to stop a large part of the outpatient work and the choice work that we do.

‘For example, yesterday I was in a surgical ward, where there would normally be many doctors in training, but now there were consultants. The advisors are fine.

“As they do that work, their list of outpatients isn’t kept up, the list of people waiting for surgeries is growing. The backlog will have increased.’

He added that the knock-on effect of more NHS staff strikes would put tackling the elective care backlog even further out of reach.

Mr Taylor added: ‘Another round of strikes would mean it would be very difficult, perhaps almost impossible, for the healthcare sector, hospitals, to meet the targets they have set this year for reducing waiting lists. ‘

The latest NHS backlog data for February shows there were 30,000 people who had been waiting for treatment for 18 months or more, often in pain.

More than 360,000 had been queuing for more than a year.

Today was the last full day of the current round of strikes by junior doctors, and doctors are expected to return to work at 7am tomorrow.

But there’s no sign of the dispute coming to an end, and staff could go back into the picket lines in the coming weeks.

The strike is part of a bitter row between the British Medical Association (BMA), which represents doctors, and the government over pay.

The union, which planned the 96-hour strike, is demanding a 35 percent salary increase, which ministers have repeatedly stressed is unaffordable.

Government sources have labeled the BMA’s demand as “ridiculous” with officials estimate that collapse would cost the country £2 billion.

So far, both the union and ministers have refused to budge, although there have been calls for the mediation agency ACAS to get involved in the hope of breaking the deadlock.

Concerns have already been raised that the first round of union action by junior medics, held over three days in March, led to an 11 percent spike in deaths that week.

The three action days between 13 and 15 March led to the cancellation of more than 175,000 appointments and surgeries.

Ahead of the latest round of strikes, senior medics warned that some patients could die as a result of disruption to planned care.

The Office for National Statistics said that in the week of the strike, and for the next seven days, 22,571 deaths were recorded, 2,247 more than average.

Professor Paul Hunter, an expert in medicine at the University of East Anglia, explained The Telegraph that it is certainly plausible that [the strikes] would have contributed [the rise in excess deaths]’.

However, experts noted that other factors may have led to the increase and it is impossible to attribute the strikes with direct responsibility.

Mr Taylor said we should be careful about linking strikes to additional deaths.

He said, “I don’t think we know, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a clear effect.”

Responding to reports linking the deaths to the strike, the BMA said such allegations were “disingenuous.”

The chairman of the union’s scientific council, Professor David Strain, insisted that no such link could be proven.

“Any increase in deaths is a concern, but it is completely wrong to say that the strikes are the root cause; the two events could have happened at the same time, but correlation is not causation and any statistician worth the effort will attest that it is impossible and potentially dangerous to attribute the rise to a single cause,” he said.

“What is clear is that this data has been used in a premature and highly selective manner to suggest that the strikes were the cause of the increase in deaths.”

He added that in Wales, where there were no strikes during that period, the death toll was even higher, up 14 percent from the previous two weeks.

Professor Strain added: ‘This is utterly irresponsible. While the government blames the BMA or puts politics before patients, this analysis plays politics with patients’ lives by falsely linking deaths to industrial action, and is being used to further undermine and attack young doctors.”

Further strike pain may also be en route from other NHS staff groups.

Members of the union for fellow healthcare workers, the Royal College of Nursing, are expected to reject a pay deal proposed by ministers and university officials last month.

The deal, which came after nurses launched a historic strike wave this winter, would earn them a 5 percent increase this fiscal year plus a one-off bonus averaging 6 percent.

Although the vote only officially closed this morning, union insiders have reported that it is expected to be rejected by members by a slim margin.

A ‘no’ result could mean more strikes next month and another vote on further action.