Here we go again. From 7am on Monday 15 June to 7am on Friday 19 June, resident doctors will walk out for yet another five-day strike. It is the latest round in a dispute the government has spectacularly failed to resolve, and once again it is not the politicians or the union bosses who suffer. It is the patient whose hip operation is cancelled, the worried parent whose appointment vanishes, the pensioner pushed further down a list they have already waited months on.
The Human Cost Is Staggering
The numbers are brutal. NHS analysis shows the strikes in 2025/26 have already led to the loss of an estimated 171,776 appointments and procedures across three rounds of industrial action. Behind every one of those cancellations is a real person, in real discomfort, whose treatment has been snatched away through no fault of their own.
During strike days the NHS keeps urgent and emergency care running, and that is right. But routine care, the operations and clinics that get people out of pain and back to work, grinds to a halt. Each walkout undoes weeks of hard-won progress in a single stroke.
Progress Being Thrown Away
What makes this so maddening is that the NHS had finally started moving in the right direction. The overall waiting list has fallen to around 7.11 million, the lowest in three and a half years, down by over half a million from its peak. The service even hit its 18-week target for the first time in years. Staff worked extraordinarily hard to claw that back.
And now, strike by strike, that progress is being put at risk. You cannot cut a waiting list while cancelling 170,000 appointments. The two things pull in opposite directions, and patients are caught in the middle of the tug of war.
A Government That Cannot Settle
This is, ultimately, a failure of leadership. Labour came to office promising it had a special relationship with the health unions and would bring the strikes to an end. Instead the walkouts keep coming, pay offers are rejected, and ministers look like passengers rather than managers. A government that cannot run an industrial relations process cannot be trusted to run a health service.
The public sympathy that doctors once enjoyed is wearing thin, because ordinary people can see the cost in their own families. Patients are not pawns in a pay negotiation. They are the entire reason the NHS exists.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would get into the room and settle this dispute like grown-ups, with an honest offer and an honest expectation that strikes affecting patient care come to an end. We would tackle the staffing crisis at its root by training more British doctors and nurses and cutting the bureaucracy that drives them out of the profession. We would put the patient, not the union, not the minister, at the centre of every decision.
The NHS belongs to the people who pay for it and rely on it. They deserve a government that can keep it running, not one that shrugs while another five-day walkout wipes out tens of thousands more appointments. After three rounds and 171,776 lost slots, the time for excuses is over.