Almost 200,000 hospital appointments and procedures in England were cancelled during last week’s junior doctors’ strikes, it has been revealed.
There were 195,000 appointments and procedures that did not happen, making the strikes the most disruptive so far to the health service, NHS England said.
This amounted to 20,000 more cancellations between 11 and 15 April than in the shorter strike in March, the figures showed.
There were 27,361 staff not at work because of the action at the peak of the strikes, though this figure could be higher as some workforce data was incomplete.
The NHS national medical director for England, Prof Sir Stephen Powis, said the figures showed the “colossal impact of industrial action on planned care in the NHS”, with nearly 500,000 appointments rescheduled over the last five months.
“Each of the 195,000 appointments postponed has an impact on the lives of individuals and their families and creates further pressure on services and on a tired workforce, and this is likely to be an underestimate of the impact as some areas provisionally avoided scheduling appointments for these strike days,” he said.
Staff will now be working hard to catch up on hundreds of thousands of appointments alongside trying to tackle the backlog that built up over the pandemic, and with each strike, “it becomes harder”, he said.
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