NHS on life support as strikes continue

A scene of "chaos" greeted Charlie Winstanley as he arrived at his local A&E in England, nursing suspected broken ribs.

"A packed, tense waiting room, with more than 100 patients ahead of me, and a seven-hour waiting time projected to worsen as the night went on," he wrote in Tribune, a political magazine founded in 1937 and published in London, as he described the experience. "People stood without chairs, others sat in clear distress, and few new names were called. Frazzled staff barked instructions as they struggled to cope."

Fresh announcements warning of longer delays echoed through the room. The waiting time had risen to nine hours. Tempers frayed. In the end, patients — including an elderly man with a heavily bleeding facial injury and a woman with a severe limp — began to "self-discharge", as it became clear there was only one consultant on duty and too few doctors to make clinical decisions.

"It was an experience thousands across Britain now recognize: overwhelmed staff, failing systems, and a level of disorganization that has quietly become the norm," he wrote.

The National Health Service, or NHS, is often hailed as a crown jewel of British culture for its universal, cradle-to-grave, and free-at-the-point-of-delivery system. Yet, on its 75th birthday in 2023, David Oliver, an NHS doctor for 34 years, wrote in the British Medical Journal that the service faced "an existential crisis as bad as at any time since (it) was founded".

Currently, the crisis is a prolonged dispute between medics seeking better pay and the government.

On Dec 1, the British Medical Association, or BMA, announced resident doctors in England would strike again this month, in the run-up to Christmas, starting a five-day walkout at 7 am on Dec 17.

This latest round of industrial action will be the 14th time resident doctors have walked off the job since March 2023 and follows a five-day strike in November.

A last-ditch government offer, which included no new pay promises but a proposed doubling of the number of extra specialty training posts to 4,000 in a bid to ease doctors' unemployment worries, was overwhelmingly rejected via a BMA indicative poll.

It came as the NHS warned it is facing its "worst-case scenario" for flu cases. Hospitalizations because of the flu surged by more than 50 percent in the first week of December and officials warned there was no sign of it peaking.