Striking ambulance workers in Bournemouth received plenty of support from passing motorists, as the UNISON and GMB unions went on strike over pay.

The workers were joined by union representatives on Wellington Road, Bournemouth, and received honks from hundreds of passing motorists to show their support.

Whilst the workers were on strike, they were ready with their ambulances, should they need to respond to any emergencies.

Janine, a regional officer for UNISON, said that it was a hard decision for the workers to take this action.

“None of them have taken this lightly, they have incredibly stressful jobs,” she said.

“They were clapped during the pandemic and now they’ve been slapped in the pay packet, and it’s not right.”

Bournemouth Echo:

Alan Lofthouse, a national officer for the union, added: “The ambulance workers are standing here today trying to get the government to take notice because they need to sit down and start talking to us about pay and the way that the NHS is being run.

“We’ve got historic waiting lists; we’ve got queues of ambulances outside hospitals, and we need the government to start talking about that as well as the pay that’s fallen so far behind inflation.”

Ambulance worker Carmen said that the problems in the system were foreseeable, but that the Government had done little to prevent them. She told about the serious issues she has seen first-hand recently.

“I had three shifts in a row, one where I was looking after patients who had been waiting for 17 hours before they even got to see a doctor, one where our radios were constantly going off saying they had no ambulances to send to category one calls and cardiac arrests because every single ambulance was sat outside a hospital in the whole county of Dorset.”

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Oscar, a hospital ambulance liaison officer, said the Government needs to start paying NHS staff a fair wage.

“The NHS is struggling to retain staff, its struggling to recruit new staff because there’s no promise of any real fair wage in this career in our service.

“We deal with the hospital trusts and the ambulance service, and they give us an insight into how much pressure our hospitals are under, and until that problem gets solved, until the emergency departments are fully staffed, and can offload people as fast as can, then you are going to see system failure.”

Also present at the picket was Councillor George Farquhar, the Labour group leader for BCP Council.

“The Labour group is always happy to support the workers and the unions,” he said. “It’s something that the Labour party was formed to be, and we’ll always be in solidarity with them.”

Wednesday's strike was the second in two months, with ambulance workers also striking in December.