Nurses strike for 17% pay rise...

They will lose a lot of support . Mostly from tax payers who aren’t getting a huge pay rise themselves and when enough hospital procedures are cancelled.

Inevitably the settlement will be less than they ask for.  

We have to sort out our health provision.  That needs some really serious non-dogmatic review of what the bottlenecks are.  

a) This may not be the whole story but it seems like social care cannot get the staff which means they cannot take elderly patients from hospital which means they stay in hospital which means that there are no beds for "real" patients in main hospitals which means they can't be moved out of A+E  which means new patients can't be seen in A+E which means that they back up in Ambulances waiting to be seen which means ambulances can't get out to pick up new patients which means people suffer and die waiting for ambulances.

If that is a reasonable synopsis of what is happening, then Government fecking sort it.  Forget tabloid worries about immigration and Brexit and all that shit. Issue some visas allowing workers to come here specifically to work in the social care sector for to least four years. If they do that they are then free to get residency and are free to work where they want.  

Immediate crisis solved. 

b) Now lets look at NHS staff and wages.  It is clear that the pressure of work in todays environment and the wage they are paid is combining to  force existing nurses and doctors to throw their arms up in the air and leave.  So in the short term we need to buy them off with a good pay rise - lets settle at 10%. Hopefully the  actions in a) take some of the strain off in the medium and in the longer term train more.  If analysis shows that this isnt enough to cure the manpower problem, then recruit from above as per a).

Doctors are also in short supply and many of the ones we have are getting close to retirement.  Pay is not an issue here , work life balance is.  So train more young doctors and in exchange for the training tie them in with a bond such that they have to work in the NHS for ten years post training or they have to pay for their training.  

c) Then lets look at the structure of the NHS. How does our service compare in output and cost to the mor successful European health services.  If say Germany produces better outcomes a lower cost, then for fecks sake copy what they do. We in this country tend to love and revere the NHs but if there are better ways of delivering the same service , then feck it do it.

d) And finally look at the causes of demand.  We are all living longer with more serious health conditions which take a huge amount of time and money to manage and keep us alive. Often though while we extend lives, we do so prioritising quantity of life over quality and condemn our elderly to miserable painful pointless existences at huge cost to the state in cash and to the individual in misery. So for feck sake recognise that death is part of life and allow(with safeguards) elderly people to choose to pass away rather than live horrid painful end of lives.  It would save billions.  

e) We have had shit government for at least six years probably longer. Time they got a grip and examined the problem and took the steps to solve it. 

If you want to understand nurses pay, the attached is an interesting read from I believe an independent source.

Section 3 Figure 3 is pretty stark - showing the nurses pay has declined significantly by about 5% in real terms comparing 2021 to 2011.  A salary increase of 5% now would double that relative decline in one year.  No wonder that is not acceptable.

www.health.org.uk/publications/long-reads/where-next-for-nhs-nurses-pay

High wage demands now will mean it will take longer for Inflation to come down, we have been there before done that and that's what happened

“A Review Body in the United Kingdom is a government mechanism to replace collective bargaining for certain groups of employees in the public sector, for example, doctors and nurses in the National Health Service”.

Independent is just a nice word.

Two points:
1) UK GDP is lower than it was before the Covid pandemic, which is why salaries - especially of public sector workers - need to be lower in real terms than they were. The public sector can't expect to be protected from inflation when the people who pay for their salaries are not. We've been paying ourselves too much for too long.
2) One of the reasons for the current inflation is that Sunak has borrowed £400 billion to pay for furlough - which makes him the most profligate chancellor in the whole of recorded history. And why did he do this? To finance the lockdowns that we were told were essential  to "save the NHS" from being overwhelmed. So the money was spent to help the nurses basically. Yet the nurses think that they should be protected from the inflation that resulted while the private sector are not.

No pay increase for the public sector. And No right to strike for the NHS.