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As the conference opened, Unison announced a date for the long called for national demonstration in defence of the NHS – Saturday 13 October.

The question of Unison’s relationship to the Labour Party was a running sore through the conference.

The possibility of a nationwide strike in the NHS has taken a big step forward as health workers voted to reject the below inflation pay award they have been offered.

An 86 year old from Derby is going blind – because his health authority won’t make his treatment available on the NHS.

The prospect of the first national strike action in the NHS in Britain for nearly two decades took a step forward this week. The Royal College of Nurses (RCN) conference voted to clear the way for its members to take industrial action.

As British health unions consider taking industrial action over pay and the state of the NHS, some 40,000 Irish nurses and midwives are in their third week of industrial action.

"Before becoming a student nurse I spent a lot of time working in bars and cafes," says John Finnegan, who came to Britain from Ireland.

The prospect of the first mass national industrial action in the NHS for almost 20 years took a big step forward last week as the Unison union agreed to ballot its members over pay.

The latest outburst of anger over New Labour’s attacks on the health service saw 12,000 junior doctors take to the streets of London last weekend.

Gordon Brown this week made clear his enthusiasm for ending universal healthcare on the NHS.

The government’s recently announced 1.9 percent pay increase for more than a million NHS workers is provoking widespread anger, particularly among those on the lowest grades.

In the course of a few days this week Yunus Bakhsh, a leading Unison union and health activist, could be both disciplined by his union and sacked from his job as a psychiatric nurse.