RCM supports letter to Jeremy Hunt

By Julie Griffiths on 16 January 2018 NHS Secretary of State for Health

The RCM has joined 11 other trade unions in an open letter calling on the health secretary Jeremy Hunt to provide the NHS with emergency funds.

RCM CEO Gill Walton has signed the letter, along with TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady and the RCN director of membership relations Chris Cox, pleading with Mr Hunt to listen to the public, and more than a million NHS employees, to fund the NHS now as the Winter crisis takes hold.

The letter highlighted the ‘acute winter health crisis’ and the 'impending flu epidemic', which is seeing patients 'stranded, treated, and sometimes dying on trolleys in corridors because wards are so overcrowded’.

It went on to say how NHS staff are often working way beyond the end of their shifts ‘to hold the NHS together so it can treat everyone who’s ill or in pain’ even though they do so in an ‘overstretched service, for declining wages and under incredibly difficult conditions’.

The letter concluded with: ‘This winter crisis will give the NHS a hangover that lasts all year long. But it doesn’t have to be like this. It’s not too late. Stop and listen to the people that know the NHS best. Who see with their own eyes every day how bad things have got. Fund it better and do so now, for all our sakes.’