Nurses on strike today over pay at Altnagelvin Hospital
Emergency and urgent care will continue to be provided by staff but planned surgery will be disrupted from 8 am today, Thursday, December 15.
Under trade union laws, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has to ensure life-preserving care remains during the strike.
Trusts have said services including non-emergency care will be affected.
The Western Trust say some services in Derry are affected by the strike:
This includes:
Outpatient appointments, including urgent ones, are postponed
Inpatient and day case procedures cancelled
GP practice treatment rooms closed.
Community nursing have been postponed and there will also be fewer nurses available on non-urgent wards.
This is the second time in three years nurses have taken to the picket line to appeal for safe staffing and fair pay.
The RCN, a trade union which represents almost 500,000 nurses in the UK, said it is campaigning for a pay rise of 5% above the RPI inflation rate to overcome real-terms pay cuts, which, it says, have left nurses 20% worse off since 2010.
In a statement, the Department of Health said fragile services will inevitably be further impaired by the strike and that the reality is there are no quick and simple solutions to the pay dispute.
The nurses’ strike comes three days after health sector workers from three of Northern Ireland’s biggest unions held a 24-hour strike over pay and conditions.
The RCN said the union is calling for a pay rise of 19.2% but ministers say this is unaffordable.
The strike comes after failed pay talks between Health Secretary Steve Barclay and Pat Cullen, the head of the RCN.
Ms Cullen said the health secretary refused to discuss pay in their meeting on Monday and therefore strikes would go ahead as planned on 15 and 20 December.
A spokesperson said the health secretary told Ms Cullen that any further pay increase would mean taking money away from front line services and tackling the post-Covid backlog.
Ms Cullen said she was”extremely disappointed at the belligerence shown” by him in the meeting.
The RCN said its pay demands follow years of squeezes on nurses’ salaries, which have not kept up with the rising cost of living.
On Wednesday, RCN members said they were shocked and devastated by a letter sent to the trade union by the chief nursing officers of England, Wales, Scotland and the North of Ireland.
The letter, addressed to Ms Cullen, said they felt let down by the RCN and asked it to reconsider given how the strike could affect certain services, such as end-of-life care and mental health.
Maureen Dolan, an RCN representative and nurse in the Southern Trust, said nurses expected the chief nursing officers to support them.
“To think that they believe we’re putting our patients at risk when the point to the strike is to ensure our patients aren’t at risk because of poor staffing,” she said.
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