Steve Barclay’s ambulance blame game isn’t working

Thousands of ambulance staff across England and Wales have walked out today in a dispute largely concerning pay rises. Members of the Unison, Unite and GMB unions will not be responding to emergency callouts unless they’re of the highest ‘category one’ calls, which cover immediately life-threatening conditions such as cardiac arrest. In most areas, ambulance staff will still attend ‘category two’ calls for strokes, heart attacks and ailments of that ilk, but they will be decided on a case-by-case basis.

Health Secretary Steve Barclay wrote, in an article for the Daily Telegraph this morning, that ‘ambulance unions have taken a conscious choice to inflict harm on patients’. But in a sector that is already overstretched, will the strikes make a tangible difference to patient safety – or is the country’s ambulance service already unfit for purpose?

In the past year, the number of patients who died while being transferred from ambulances to hospital wards more than doubled – from 40 in 2020/21 to 93 in the past 12 months, according to figures from NHS England, obtained by the GMB union.