For 144 hours between 7 and 13 April, the NHS in England ground through another resident doctor strike — the longest stretch of the latest dispute. Emergency care continued. Routine appointments, planned procedures, and non-urgent treatment were postponed for thousands of patients. And Labour, elected in part on a promise to "fix the NHS," still has no grip on its own workforce.
A Six-Day Strike Is a Political Failure
Let's be clear about what this represents. A six-day strike is not a doctor problem. It is not a pay committee problem. It is a government problem. When you cannot negotiate successfully with your own staff after multiple rounds, you are not running the service — you are being run over by it.
The dispute sits at a 3.5 per cent offer for 2026/27 against a resident doctor demand for full pay restoration to 2008 levels in real terms. Both positions are arguable. What isn't arguable is that the government has allowed the dispute to drag on through multiple strike waves while waiting lists, backlogs and public patience all suffer.
Waiting Lists Are Falling — Despite Labour, Not Because of It
There is one piece of good news. NHS waiting lists have fallen for four consecutive months. The list for treatment in England sits at roughly 7.22 million as of February, down from 7.25 million in January. The number of patients waiting over a year for routine treatment is at its lowest point since August 2020.
Credit where it is due: that is real progress. But let's be honest about the cause. The progress has come in spite of the strikes, driven by NHS staff working harder to recover lost ground during industrial action. It has not come because the government found a way to manage the dispute. It has come because the people who actually work in the NHS kept showing up despite their government's failure to negotiate.
Patients Are Paying the Price
Every strike day means cancelled operations. Cancelled outpatient appointments. Cancelled diagnostic scans. For a patient waiting for a hip replacement, a cancer screening, or a cardiology referral, each round of industrial action is not a headline — it is another month of pain, anxiety or risk.
The government's answer has been a series of "final offers" that haven't turned out to be final, and a series of talks that haven't turned out to resolve anything. This is not leadership. This is muddling through.
Pay, Productivity, and the British Worker
There's a wider point here. If this government cannot even manage pay negotiations with its own directly-employed professionals — people who want to work, who believe in the service, who are doing their best in difficult conditions — what chance does it have of delivering the broader workforce reforms the NHS desperately needs?
The NHS needs modernised rotas, better progression, proper support for the people at the front line, and an end to the culture of treating staff as interchangeable. None of that can happen while the department is locked in a multi-year pay fight it cannot win or end.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would bring these disputes to a close through transparent, credible, one-shot negotiation backed by real workforce reform. We would invest in British training places rather than relying on emergency overseas recruitment to plug gaps. We would reward productivity and long service within the NHS, rather than letting experienced staff drift to private practice or abroad.
The British public does not want more strikes. British doctors and nurses do not want more strikes. The only people who have failed to prevent them are the ones sitting in the Department of Health.