Unions and other groups representing most of the NHS’s 1.4 million-strong workforce, including the Royal College of Nursing, British Medical Association, Unison, and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, a professional body for the UK’s 240,000 doctors, have sent Boris Johnson a letter pleading that the government spend billions of pounds to finally end the chronic lack of staff across the health service.
The strain of working in a perpetually understaffed service is so great that it risks creating an exodus of frontline personnel, they warn the prime minister in a letter published on Wednesday.
Their intervention comes after the latest NHS staff survey found that growing numbers of them feel their work is making them sick and that almost two-thirds believe they cannot do their jobs properly because their organisation has too few people.
Full story in The Guardian, 21 April 2021