NHS strikes: Hospital boss says preparing for winter amid walkouts 'like going into battle with one hand behind your back'

The chief executive of a busy NHS Hospital Trust has described preparing for winter amid ongoing industrial action by consultants and junior doctors as "going into a really tough battle with one arm tied behind your back".

Matthew Trainer, CEO Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust, was speaking exclusively to Sky News on the first day of unprecedented joint action by consultants and their junior doctor colleagues.

"I think we've cancelled more than 10,000 outpatient appointments here. We've cancelled more than 1,000 none urgent surgeries and a small number of urgent surgeries. What we're increasingly seeing is actually, we're not cancelling things because we're not even booking stuff in any more for the strike days. It feels like we're walking into a really tough battle with one hand tied behind our back."

Mr Trainer who has two hospitals under his care: the Queen's Hospital in Essex and the King George Hospital in Ilford said his patients and his staff are suffering because of the industrial action by NHS health workers now in its 10th month.

"It's about the patients who are not getting access to the care that they need. And the second thing, it's about the staff that we're asking, at times now to work in some really tough circumstances. I regularly meet our Emergency Department teams because they tend to bear the brunt of it," he said.

"Emergency Departments are the last un-rationed part of health care, they're the only place you can walk into and guarantee someone will see you. And as a result, we're seeing real pressures piled on to them."

Some 900,000 NHS appointments have been cancelled across England since December last year. Hospitals now routinely do not book appointments for strike days: the dates are announced at least six weeks in advance. That means the true figure for disruption of elective care is likely to be much higher.

Mr Trainer said NHS Trusts needed to plan for the coming months with certainty but could not do that with the threat of continued strikes.

"Trying to get the workforce in the right frame of mind for winter is our biggest challenge just now," he said.

"Because we need to be able to say to people, you can come into our hospitals with confidence and we'll do our very best to offer you safe, good quality care. And what we're trying to do now is to do that, but also to manage his constant disruptions from the strikes. And, you know, I'm not in the position to talk about how these negotiations should play out.

"But I think it would offer us a lot of comfort if we could see that proper negotiations were taking place. Because we need a path out of this, it isn't tenable to go right through the winter, losing a week's worth of planned care activity."

He continued: "And also to go into it in a position where, particularly our junior doctors or doctors in training, some of our best and brightest graduates, people who want to have a lifetime career committed to the NHS: I don't want them to be in a position where they don't feel that we don't value and respect the contribution they've got to make."

But this uncertainty is likely to be the case for months to come, deep into another crippling winter. The junior doctors and consultants have long mandates for strike action and show no sign of calling them off.

Their union, the BMA, will feel vindicated in its action after learning that the public is more than twice as likely to blame the government for the ongoing strikes than the doctors' trade unions, by 45% compared to 21% according to a YouGov poll commissioned by Sky News.

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Rishi Sunak has made bringing down waiting lists one of his key pledges. But that is not achievable unless there is a resolution to what is becoming an increasingly bitter and protracted dispute. It also means Trusts are not able to prepare for the fast-approaching winter.

"I think we're getting to a position now where it's making it very hard to plan for what's going to be the toughest period of the year in the NHS. It feels like we're walking into a really tough battle with one hand tied behind our back and real uncertainty around how we plan for this winter.

"We've got clinical staff trying to deliver good quality health care in some really challenging environments at the minute. And this is just adding to the strain they're feeling and adding to the pressures on the NHS."