Clear message: nurses took strike action at UCLH and Great Ormond Street hospitals in February

SIR Keir Starmer’s Lab­our Party has fallen out of touch with health workers and hospital staff, union reps said this week, after a new overtime shifts policy went down like a lead balloon.

As delegates gathered in Liverpool for the party’s annual conference, Sir Keir pledged to pump an extra £1.1billion into the health service to pay for staff to work evening and weekend shifts.

The leader insisted this would help crack the appointment and routine surgery waiting lists backlog, which built up to historic levels during the Covid-19 pandemic.

It also follows a historic phase of rolling strike action by consultants, nurses, and junior doctors who were calling for significant pay rises not more overtime opportunities.

On the picket line they stressed that they were already feeling burnt out from working exhausting shifts, this due in part to dangerously high vacancy levels in hospitals, particularly in nursing.

It means that many staff are already working double-time to cover positions, and often do more than they are paid for out of goodwill.

Janet Maiden, the University College London Hospitals Unison branch secretary, who has been an NHS nurse for 40 years, said: “The bottom line with Keir Starmer is where has he been for the past two years?

“Did he not see us out on strike, does he not realise why we have been out on strike?

“Why did he not come and join us on the picket lines at UCH? Does he understand what we want?”

Labour MPs have stayed away from a whole host of picket lines at train stations, school gates, and the doors of hospitals over the past year.

Ms Maiden added: “If Keir thinks that financial incentives are enough, I’d say to him: ‘Let’s broaden that. Let’s get rid of pay review bodies. Let’s give out pay rises uprated with inflation.’

“There are 140,000 nursing vacancies.

“It’s partly because there are so many people doing more than just one job. People can’t go on doing more than one job for ever. You can’t run the NHS like a production line.

“People need to be able to make extra time for themselves. We need a better work-life balance.”

Ms Maiden, who has worked for 31 years on the wards at the hospital near Euston, described how a work WhatsApp group was set up years ago so nurses could be informed when “bank” [agency] shifts were available.

“They used to get snapped up within a few minutes but now they just sit there, often there is no response,” she said.

“We used to squabble over shifts.

“Now you say a shift is going and no one wants it. People are too jaded, too exhausted.

“The facts are that nurses are willing to work. They want to work. They care about the patients. But they need more to support themselves financially.”

Overtime shifts would likely bring more cash in the pocket for staff than the current system of taking a “bank shift”, where a profit-seeking agency takes its cut from the NHS.

But overtime could also take nurses into a higher tax bracket, something Ms Maiden said was a big issue for nurses.

The Royal College of Nursing, which represents 500,000 members, argued nursing staff already work “so much overtime that is never paid” and that a “change in this culture is needed”.

“As part of their shift patterns, weekend work is routine for many,” the union’s chief nurse, Professor Nicola Ranger, said. “Any Labour government would likely take office at a time of record unfilled nurse jobs, in excess of 40,000, and so the long-term answer is, of course, to have more staff overall… extra capacity is urgently required”.

The British Medical Association, the doctors’ union, added: “Paying doctors properly for overtime is not only the right thing to do but would be more cost effective than using the private sector or making extra-contractual payments.”

Sir Keir Starmer has defended his plan, arguing that doctors would sign up for extra weekend shifts despite being able to earn more in the private sector.

He told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme that doctors would stick with the NHS “because they want to bring down the waiting list as well”.