Strike action by Royal College of Nursing colleagues

As you will know, Royal College of Nursing (RCN) members at Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust, along with many others across the country, took industrial action last week.

On behalf of all my colleagues, I wanted to express my thanks to everyone across the whole system who supported us to keep services safe during the strike. Thank you also to everyone who used services appropriately on strike days.

To maintain patient safety, the RCN agreed that some of our services were exempt from full strike action. Therefore, we were able to keep critical services, such as community hospitals, acute response nursing teams, urgent treatment centres and children’s complex nursing services running on reduced, but safe, staffing levels, while RCN colleagues were still able to make their voices heard.

We are working closely with RCN representatives, our service leads and all our colleagues to plan for any further strikes and will use the learning from these two days to help us. The next RCN strike is on 6 and 7 February, however, KCHFT is not on the list for action at this time.

Thank you for your continued support.

Mairead McCormick
Chief Executive