NHS Confederation responds to statistics showing impact of latest junior doctor strikes

Responding to the new NHS England data showing that over 113,000 appointments and operations were cancelled during the longest strike in NHS history, Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said:

“These figures show the mountain the NHS has to climb in order to bring the backlog down, with high winter viruses and absence levels likely to delay any kind of recovery even further. These strikes also came during one of the busiest weeks of the year for NHS services, with trusts declaring critical incidents and calling for junior doctors to return to work. Only the extensive planning carried out by staff kept the show on the road, stopping services from buckling completely.

“The fallout from this wave of industrial action is likely to be felt for a long time. NHS leaders and their teams now face the challenge of rebooking over 100,000 of patients whose planned care was displaced.

“What is potentially more worrying is we do not know how many patients avoided coming forward for care due to the strikes and what kind of backlog this could create for already overstretched services. Now this brings the total of cancelled appointments and operations in the last year to over 1.3 million but we believe could be a significant underestimate because trusts have pre-emptively avoided making appointments during periods of industrial action, so the actual number of cancelled appointments could be double this.”