Nearly 1,500 Nottinghamshire appointments rescheduled during to latest doctor strikes, NHS figures show
NHS England has revealed figures on how many doctors’ appointments had to be rescheduled during five days of industrial strike action which ended last month.
Resident doctors went on strike between Friday, July 25, and Tuesday, July 29.
It saw, on some days, hundreds of appointments cancelled across singular hospital trusts’ regions. The NHS data shows statistics for both inpatient and outpatient appointments, with plenty more of those where resident doctors were due to visit patients at home being cancelled compared to visits to the actual doctors.
Over Nottinghamshire’s two hospital trusts, Nottingham University Hospitals (NUH) and Sherwood Forest Hospitals, nearly 1,500 appointments had to be rescheduled in total. For NUH, on the first day of industrial action, 12 inpatient and 200 outpatient appointments were cancelled.
Over the weekend of July 26, and 27, only one inpatient appointment was rescheduled on the Sunday. But over the final two days of the action, the cancellations increased.
Twenty inpatient appointments were rescheduled on Monday, July 28, with 320 outpatients pushed back. The next day, 32 inpatients were rescheduled with 223 outpatients changed.
Across Sherwood Forest Hospitals, 12 inpatient and 133 outpatient appointments were rescheduled on Friday, just five inpatient appointments were rescheduled on Saturday and just one on Sunday, with no outpatient appointments affected over the weekend.
On Monday, July 28, there were 27 inpatient and 203 outpatient appointments cancelled, with figures of 24 and 250 respectively on Tuesday 29.
In total across the UK, 54,095 inpatient and outpatient appointments were rescheduled. The NHS says this was improvement on 2024 when there were strikes at a similar time of the year.
This time around, an estimated additional 11,071 appointments and procedures went ahead. There were 1,243 fewer staff absent on average each day in comparison.