UK facing winter of discontent

Britain’s National Health Service (The NHS)) is “bracing itself for an influx of patients” in the coming days after thousands of people deferred seeking treatment during the ambulance workers’ strike, said The Guardian. Senior doctors fear that the decision by many people not to request help while paramedics were staging Wednesday’s 24-hour stoppage will leave the NHS struggling to cope at a time when hospitals would “traditionally be scaling back their services for the festive break”, said the paper. Meanwhile, ambulance workers told The Times that they have to visit food banks to survive. The government called in the army to shore up the ambulance service whose workers’ walkout followed the first strike in the 106-year history of the Royal College of Nurses which was widely supported by the British public facing a “ winter of discontent.”