Last week nurses across 176 NHS organisations voted to take strike action.
The Chancellor has admitted the NHS “is on the brink of collapse” and has ruled out increasing nurse pay.
Chancellor and former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said there were “massive pressures in the NHS … with doctors, nurses on the frontline frankly under unbearable pressure”.
However, he said the service received a lot of money and “we need to do everything we can to find efficiencies”.
Mr Hunt’s comments come only a week after nurses across 176 NHS organisations voted to take strike action over deteriorating pay and working conditions.
When asked about nurses’ pay, Mr Hunt added, “I think we have to recognise a difficult truth: that if we gave everyone inflation-proof pay rises, inflation would stay, we wouldn’t bring down inflation, and that’s why I’m not pretending there aren’t some difficult decisions.”
Running down the NHS.
Official figures show that a massive 7.1 million people in England are waiting for hospital treatment, the highest since records began in August 2007.
Unison General Secretary Christina McAnea accused the Tories of “deliberately running down the NHS” to privatise the running of it.
“Difficult things will happen if they do not make the right choices and one of those is the NHS is almost ready to collapse,” McAnea said.
Ms McAnea added, “Excuse me for sounding like a conspiracy theorist but I have heard so many people say it now: is this partly a deliberate attempt by the government to run down the NHS in order to bring in some kind of organisation to run it?
“I hope that’s not what they are doing, what they aren’t doing is making the right choices of investing in our public services.”
