Hospital bosses fear a “nightmare” scenario if a second junior doctors’ walkout goes ahead as it will coincide with a proposed Tube strike, the Standard can reveal.
Contingency plans are being ramped up across the London NHS amid concerns that a total shutdown of the Underground on January 26 will make it even harder to provide cover for absent junior doctors.
This could have far greater impact on patients than the first doctors’ strike on Tuesday, when 522 operations were postponed in the capital and thousands of outpatient clinics were cancelled.
Today the Standard can also reveal that hundreds of non-urgent operations were postponed by NHS chiefs over Christmas when 28 “struggling” hospital trusts were ordered to “clear the decks” to avert a feared winter meltdown in A&E.
Hospitals were told to reduce bed occupancy to 80 per cent by Christmas Eve to ensure there was spare capacity to admit people taken ill over the two-week festive period.
Barts Health, which has five east London hospitals and is in special measures, was one of those told to free up beds. Another was London North West Healthcare, which runs Northwick Park and Ealing hospitals.
Barts’ chief operating officer Jacqueline Totterdell said cancer patients and those on the waiting list for more than a year had their operations proceed as normal.
She said the system worked well as it enabled 90 per cent of its A&E patients to be seen within four hours for most of the Christmas and New Year period.
As talks between the Government and the BMA were resuming today at Acas, one senior NHS boss said it would “be a nightmare” if the 48-hour doctors’ strike due to start at 8am on January 26 went ahead as it would overlap with a walkout called by three unions over the Night Tube.
Tube unions are also due to strike on February 15 and 17, while junior doctors have planned a third walkout — including A&E and maternity departments for the first time — on February 10.
An NHS spokesman said it was aware the next junior doctors’ action co-incides with a Tube strike and added: “We are taking steps to plan for this and working closely with the London Ambulance Service... to ensure patients will continue to receive the care they need.”
