ESCALATED NHS strikes will have a “significant impact” on services, health unions warned today, after thousands more ambulance workers voted to down tools over plummeting take-home pay and understaffing.

Announcing re-ballot results, Unison said its members at another four English ambulance services and five NHS organisations, including Great Ormond Street children’s hospital, have backed walkouts for the first time in a significant escalation of the increasingly bitter dispute. 

And despite an improved wage offer from devolved Labour ministers in Wales, GMB confirmed that about 1,500 workers west of the Severn Bridge will join a strike by almost 10,000 colleagues in England on Monday after members said the proposal is “too low.”

The announcements came just a day after the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) confirmed an unprecedented 48-hour walkout — including those working in A&E, intensive care units, cancer care and other services previously exempted — from 6am on March 1 across England.

The union reiterated its frustration at Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s stubborn refusal to reopen talks on 2022-23’s massively below-inflation 4.75 per cent average deal.

Unison general secretary Christina McAnea said: “It’s time the PM ditched his do-nothing strategy for dealing with escalating NHS strikes. 

“Sadly, health workers across England have been met with a wall of silence from Number 10. The PM stubbornly refuses to talk about pay, preferring to subject everyone to many months of disruption.”

Ms McAnea said the public “must think the Westminster government is living on another planet” after Cardiff’s latest offer — 1.5 per cent extra plus a one-off lump sum of the same amount — saw most health unions postpone a massive walkout in Wales on February 6.  

GMB’s announcement today means it is set to rejoin Unite on picket lines, but RCN is still considering the Welsh deal.

Strikes have so far been avoided in Scotland, where SNP ministers offered 8 per cent for 2023-24 today.

“People can see how talks in other parts of the UK have lifted the threat of strikes and cannot understand why the PM isn’t doing the same,” Ms McAnea stressed.

Unison’s members at South Central, East of England, West Midlands and East Midlands ambulance services will now join industrial action, as will workers at NHS Blood and Transplant, the Great Ormond Street and Liverpool Women’s hospitals and two trusts, Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust and the Bridgewater Community Trust.

GMB thanked the Labour government in Wales for “actually entering talks” but said two-thirds of members had dismissed its latest offer.

The union’s Nathan Holman said: “Now more than ever, we need a UK-wide solution to the scourge of low pay that has affected our NHS and ambulance services.

“The only person who can take responsibility for that is Health Secretary Steve Barclay and it’s time for him to step up and talk pay – workers across England and Wales are waiting.”

RCN general secretary Pat Cullen accepted strikes would add to risks to patients, but stressed: “What our patients are facing every day, in a depleted health service, a health service in crisis, poses significant risk and significant challenge.”

She called on Mr Sunak to step in after there being no communication with the Department of Health for a month.

Downing Street has claimed more generous public-sector wage settlements are “unaffordable,” but the NHS Confederation, which represents health trusts, urged ministers to settle the dispute quickly.

Chief executive Matthew Taylor told BBC Breakfast: “That really difficult challenge of reducing waiting lists becomes almost impossible if this industrial actions spreads — and it is spreading.

“The government’s aspiration to lower waiting lists is now being jeopardised by this ongoing industrial action.”