“It is pretty unprecedented,” Billy Palmer, senior fellow at Nuffield Trust, a health research firm, told CNN.
While small pockets of nursing staff have walked out before, the country’s National Health Service has seen “nothing of this scale until now,” he added.
‘Enough is enough’Earlier this year, the RCN rejected an offer by the government to increase nurses’ pay by a minimum of £1,400 ($1,707) a year.
Each additional 1% pay rise for nursing staff would cost the government around £700 million ($854 million), he added.
Internationally, it is hard to compare UK nurses’ pay, given health care systems differ significantly between countries, but it falls somewhere in the middle of the range of comparable economies, Palmer said.