Hundreds of nurses in the United Kingdom on Thursday embarked on a strike to demand better pay. In November, they demanded a 19 per cent increase in their salary.
The NHS pay review body was said to have recommended a pay increase of at least £1,400 ($1,740) in addition to a three per cent pay rise in 2021, an offer the RCN rejected.
According to a report by CNN, as many as 100,000 members of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), which is the UK’s biggest nursing union, opted for the industrial action in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
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The industrial action is the largest nurses’ strike in the history of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) and the first time in its 106-year history.
RCN General Secretary, Pat Cullen, said the strike marked “a tragic day” in nursing and called on the government to “do the decent thing” to resolve the dispute.
“We need to stand up for our health service, we need to find a way of addressing those over seven million people that are sitting on waiting lists, and how are we going to do that? By making sure we have got the nurses to look after our patients, not with 50,000 vacant posts, and with it increasing day by day,” she said.
