UK nurses launch historic strike over poor pay, funding

Nurses across the UK, on Thursday began a historic strike, as they walked out of hospitals and onto picket lines after several years of falling pay and declining standards left the country’s nationalized health care system in a state of crisis.

As many as 100,000 members of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) – the UK’s biggest nursing union – are taking industrial action in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, in the latest and most unprecedented of a wave of strikes that has swept Britain this winter. It is the largest strike in the RCN’s 106-year history.

But it comes after several years of hardship for employees of Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), a revered but beleaguered institution that is straining due to staffing shortfalls, sky-high demand and stretched funding.

“I went into nursing to care for patients, and over the years my capacity to provide the level of care my patients deserve has been compromised,” Andrea Mackay, who has worked as a nurse for seven years at a hospital in southwest England, told CNN on her reasons for striking Thursday.

“The reality is, every day, nurses across the UK are walking into understaffed hospitals,” Mackay said. “The NHS has been running on the compassion and goodwill of nurses for years … It is unsustainable.”

“It’s about paying staff what they’re worth so they can pay the bills,” Jessie Collins, a pediatric nurse preparing to join the strike, told CNN, adding that staffing pressures have crippled the emergency department she regularly works in. “During one of my worst shifts I was the only nurse to 28 unwell children … it’s not safe and we cannot deliver the care that these children need at times,” she said.