The head of the NHS in England has said patients will “pay the price” because ministers and health unions have failed to stop unprecedented strikes this month, with the health secretary, Steve Barclay, accusing junior doctors of “walking away” from talks.
Amanda Pritchard, the chief executive of the health service in England, said the “significant disruption” was only going to get worse in July, with industrial action due to take place in seven in eight days in the middle of the month.
“The hard truth is that it is patients that are paying the price for the fact all sides have not managed to reach a resolution,” she told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg programme.
Nurses have already been on strike last year before an agreement was reached. Junior doctors are heading out on a five-day strike, with consultants taking action for 48 hours later that week.
“Consultants going on strike is a different level of challenge again,” Pritchard said. She highlighted that more than half a million appointments had already been cancelled and urged an end to the dispute. “There’s no doubt the sooner we can bring this to a resolution the better for patients. We can’t let it become business as usual for the NHS.”
Barclay was pressed on Sunday morning on what he was doing to bring an end to the strikes. He told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge that it was junior doctors who had walked away from talks over pay and conditions.
“We were in the middle of discussing some of those wider non-pay issues. It was the junior doctors suddenly who walked away,” he said.
The strikes come ahead of the NHS’s 75th anniversary. The prime minister and Barclay published a plan last week to train up more medical staff in their first workforce plan.
Barclay said the extra £2.4bn needed to fund more medical school and nursing places would come from the Treasury, and said it was new money, but there have been no plans set out so far for how it would be paid for through tax rises, spending cuts or more borrowing.
Pritchard acknowledged the NHS was facing huge challenges with staff vacancies and long waiting lists following the Covid pandemic. Sunak has put cutting waiting lists at the heart of his five priorities for the country, staking his premiership on achieving his goals.
The NHS chief suggested it would be another two years before the NHS got its waiting lists back under control.
James Bethell, a former health minister during the height of the Covid pandemic, said the situation at the moment with waiting lists amounted to “rationing”.
Speaking after Pritchard, he said the NHS “just doesn’t deliver to everyone and you had that clip from Kevin who was waiting for kidney treatment for eight, nine, 10 months, that is rationing. That is not a logical, clinical decision.
“If someone has a need for an operation and you simply don’t have the resources to give them what they need then you are going beyond the important protocols of allocating scarce resources in the best way possible and you are being defined by the amount of resources that you have available.
“I think that there is a difference between reasonable allocation of resources and making tough decisions which is part of every day life, and having to cope with a system as overwhelmed with illness. It breaks my heart talking about gambling clinics and spending money mopping up the waste from gambling and casinos when there is someone waiting for a kidney operation. That makes no sense at all.”
