Scarborough Hospital bosses say nurses’ bank holiday strike will be ‘challenging’

A judge has ruled that planned England-wide strike action by members of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) will have to be cut short by a day and will now end at 11.59pm on May 1.

The RCN had originally announced a round-the-clock 48-hour strike set to end at 8pm on May 2, but a UK High Court judge has ruled that the RCN’s last day of planned action fell outside its six-month mandate for strikes.

The bank holiday strike will now start at 8pm on Sunday, April 30 and will end at 11.59pm on Monday, May 1.

The union is “campaigning to rectify years of real-term pay cuts” which it says have put the safety of patients and staff at risk.

However, the chief executive of the York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Simon Morritt, has said that the bank holiday action will prove to be “challenging”.

Speaking at its board meeting on Wednesday, April 26, Mr Morrit said: “Obviously, Unison voted to accept the pay offer and the RCN did not in terms of nurses, so we have another strike taking place this weekend.”

The chief executive said the bank holiday strike would be “more problematic” because “it is effectively a non-working day” and the Trust would not be able to implement measures in place during working days “to move staff who would’ve otherwise been engaged in elective activity”.

“So, we’re onward planning and we are progressing, but it will be a challenging bank holiday,” added Mr Morritt.

After the High Court decision, the RCN’s general secretary Pat Cullen said: “It is the darkest day of this dispute so far – the government taking its own nurses through the courts in bitterness at their simple expectation of a better pay deal.”

She said the decision could make nurses “more determined to vote in next month’s reballot for a further six months of strike action”.

For the first time, the industrial action will also involve nursing staff working in emergency departments, intensive care units, cancer care and other services that were previously exempt.