The doctors are out again. After a brief reprieve when the planned 15–19 June action was called off, strike action has returned to the NHS this week. And once more, the people who pay the price are not the politicians or the union negotiators. They are the patients — the ones whose operations are cancelled, whose appointments vanish, whose pain is told to wait a little longer.
The Human Cost of a Year of Strikes
The scale of disruption is staggering. Industrial action across 2025/26 has already cost an estimated 171,776 appointments and procedures. Behind every one of those is a real person: a cancer patient waiting on a scan, a pensioner waiting on a hip, a worried parent waiting on a referral. They did nothing wrong, yet they are the ones left in limbo.
Labour came to office promising to end the strikes and fix the NHS. They settled one dispute, declared victory, and assumed the problem was solved. It wasn't. The disputes have kept coming, and the government has been left looking flat-footed and out of ideas every single time.
Spin Is Not a Strategy
Ministers will point to falling waiting lists and a recovering 18-week target. Genuine progress should be acknowledged — but you cannot strike your way to a healthy NHS, and you cannot spin your way out of a walkout. Every day of industrial action undoes weeks of recovery and pushes the backlog back up. The two facts cannot be separated, however much the Health Department would like them to be.
The truth is that the NHS lurches from one dispute to the next because the government has no durable plan for pay, for workforce, or for the staggering vacancies that leave wards short-handed and morale on the floor. Crisis management is not the same as leadership.
Patients Deserve Better Than This
When I talk to constituents in Preston East, they are not interested in who is winning the argument between Whitehall and the BMA. They want to be seen. They want their operation to go ahead. They want to ring their GP and get an appointment. That is not a lot to ask of the most expensive public service in the country.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would get a grip on the workforce crisis that sits underneath these disputes — proper planning, an end to the reliance on costly agency staff, and a serious effort to retain the British-trained doctors and nurses we keep losing. We would cut the layers of management bureaucracy that swallow money meant for the front line, and put that money where patients actually feel it. Fund the front line, not the spin operation.
Labour promised the strikes would stop. The doctors are on the picket line again and 171,000 appointments are gone. The country was promised competence. It got another cancelled operation.