Unite announce strike action at Queen's Hospital, Romford

On 22 April, Unite announced that workers are ramping up their strike action at Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust.

The industrial action began back in January, centering on issues of privatisation and pay protection. Staff staged eight days of strikes over the course of February and March.

Both the pathology and clinical engineering staff at Romford’s Queen’s Hospital are taking part. They’ll gather for their latest demonstration outside the hospital from 27 April to 1 May.

Sharon Graham, Unite’s general secretary, said:

The trust’s pathology and clinical engineering workforce are absolutely right to take strike action. The trust is failing to offer fair pay protection to pathology workers and there are serious questions to answer about outsourcing in both the clinical engineering and pathology departments. These workers have their union’s total backing.

Outsourcing and neglect

The two branches of staff are taking part in the strikes for slightly different reasons.

For their part, the clinical engineering staff have recently been forced to transfer their roles from the NHS to Siemens Healthineers, a private medical technology company based in Germany.

Likewise, the NHS trust also plans to outsource the clinical engineering department to the company.

The clinical engineers themselves are demanding an independent investigation into the issues. Unite, meanwhile, asserts that Siemens offers neither value for money, nor the best home for the staff members.

In fact, Siemens has already been forced to fork over a £1.3 million reimbursement to the NHS trust. Unite stated that it:

understands this payment is for the failure to service critical medical equipment, including MRI scanners, for more than a decade.

However, whilst Siemens apparently couldn’t find the money to maintain vital equipment, it could spare the cash to send NHS CEO Michael Trainer to a Healthineers conference in Munich in January 2025.

In fact, the clearly struggling company was generous enough to pay for Trainer’s hotel, food and flight expenses. Definitely more mission-critical than the MRI machines, that lot.

Pay protection

Meanwhile, the pathology staff are fighting against the trust’s failure to provide proper pay protection.

Bosses recently hit the department with a new shift system, which will leave some workers between £400 and £1,000 worse off a month. Whilst the trust gave senior managers enhanced pay protection, it didn’t see fit to extend the same grace to the staff members who keep the department running on a day-to-day basis.

However, the workers’ misgivings with the trust don’t end there.

During negotiations, Unite voiced staff fears that the bosses may choose to privatise the pathology department in much the same way as their clinical engineering co-workers. If this were to happen, the workers’ lack of adequate pay protection would be all the more ruinous.

The union reported that the trust failed to offer a response. This, in turn, only served to heighten concerns on the outsourcing of the pathology department.

Unite regional officer Sujata Virdee added a warning:

The trust must come clean about its plans for pathology, offer its workers proper pay protection and allow an independent investigation into the outsourcing of the clinical engineering department.

The union has already vowed that the industrial action will intensify if the trust doesn’t resolve the workers’ issues. In the meantime, the bosses have five days of strikes to consider whether their plan to prioritise negligent private companies and senior managers over and above the workers is working out.