NHS 'prioritising urgent patients' during strikes

The NHS is prioritising emergency and urgent care in a bid to cope with the first national walkout by hospital staff for 20 years. A&E units, cancer treatment, maternity departments and end-of-life care seem to be running as normal, managers said. But thousands of routine treatments and appointments are being cancelled. Health Secretary Andrew Lansley said it was inevitable patients would suffer "inconvenience" because of the scale of the walkout. Health workers who are members of Unison and Unite are taking part in the strikes. Between them they have more than 500,000 health staff, including nurses, healthcare workers, admin staff, porters and cleaners. But not all of these have walked out because unions have agreed urgent care should not be affected. For example, ambulance staff are on strike but they are still on hand to answer 999 calls. Radiographers, podiatrists and chiropodists have also walked out. However, the British Medical Association, Royal College of Nursing and Royal College of Midwives are not taking part. 'Disputes of the 1980s' Dean Royles, director of NHS Employers, said: "I want to be clear that the NHS's over-riding priority will be the safety of our patients. "Many services will be working in much the same way they do at a weekend or on a bank holiday." Alongside urgent care, GP services are largely unaffected. Nonetheless, the scale of industrial action is likely to be greater than the disputes of the late 1980s when nurses and ambulance crews walked out. In England, the Department of Health is expecting more than 5,000 elective operations to be cancelled and 12,000 diagnostic tests delayed - about a fifth of the total in each case. Routine treatment will also be affected elsewhere in the UK. Health boards in Wales have already confirmed 300 operations and thousands of appointments have been scrapped. However, the impact is being minimised by the fact some hospitals did not book as many patients in on Wednesday as they normally would because they knew the strike was being planned. And many are urging patients to turn up as normal if they have not heard of their care being disrupted The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs five hospitals - the Royal Oldham Hospital, North Manchester and Fairfield General Hospitals, Rochdale Infirmary and Birch Hill - said no operations have been cancelled so far and they were expecting "minimal disruption". The Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust reported something similar. Elsewhere, people are being asked to be patient and expect delays if they are in hospital. Blackpool Hospitals NHS Trust said, so far, 211 out of 1,149 outpatient appointments had been cancelled, along with 47 out of 99 operations. Pat Oliver, the trust's director of operations, said: "The hospital will be running similar to a Christmas Day service, which means that all essential and emergency services will run as normal. "However, services are likely to be under extra pressure so we would ask people to bear with us as they may experience some delays as patients will be seen in order of clinical priority."