Ministers and health leaders urge people to be cautious as ambulance workers and other NHS staff strike for between 12 and 24 hours
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Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, which represents NHS organisations, told BBC Breakfast he wanted to “encourage our colleagues in the ambulance service in the trade unions to work as cooperatively as they can through today’s industrial action to try to minimise patient harm”.
These strikes come on top of the fact that we are already in a very challenging situation.
In most parts of the country the ambulance service is well away from meeting its targets for responses to those kind of category 2 cases – so not absolutely urgently, life threatening, but still very important urgent and critical cases.
The difficulty with putting contingency measures in place is given the uncertainty as to what exactly is and is not being covered, and the fact that those decisions in some cases will be taken on the day.
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