Cheltenham General Hospital will shut its accident and emergency department at 20:00 BST on Sunday and reopen on Monday as a daytime-only Minor Injury and Illness Unit, with the change lasting through the doctors’ four-day strike. Normal overnight cover will return on Friday, when the department switches back to an A&E.
The move puts a hard deadline on the effect of the Bma strikes in Gloucestershire and is the clearest sign yet that the walkout is reaching into front-line hospital care. Dr Ananthakrishnan Raghuram said the action is likely to pose significant challenges to the local NHS, particularly hospital services, and added that patients might experience some disruption.
For people trying to plan around the shutdown, the timing matters. Gloucestershire Royal Hospital’s A&E will operate normal hours during the strike, while NHS Gloucestershire has told patients with planned operations, clinics or procedures to attend as usual unless they are told otherwise. Visiting arrangements are not expected to change.
The dispute behind the strike has been running for months. Resident doctors have received a collective 33% pay rise over the last four years, but their union says they are still paid a fifth less than they were in 2008 once inflation is taken into account. The government says their pay is fair, and Health Secretary James Murray has called the union’s demands unrealistic, unaffordable and unsustainable.
That gap explains why the action is not stopping at one hospital or one weekend. The British Medical Association has already announced more strike action, and the question now is not whether patients in Gloucestershire feel the effect, but how long hospitals can keep patching together emergency cover while the dispute continues.
