Liberty and respect are often taken for granted but when you hear about the Roe-v-Wade decision in the US or the fact that girls in some countries are deprived of the basics like education then you start to question why are still having to fight against such injustice. As a society we get much right but when there is unfairness, what do we do?

I have long felt our senior citizens are treated with less respect and their loss of liberty is not even questioned. I know that is not a universal sentiment we care to admit being part of, but we certainly seem to have become desensitised when our elderly are disregarded.

We have heard a lot about impending strikes by various service providers including by those providing essential medical care. I heard a Radio 4 interview with a union representative talking about the many reasons why striking was their only option to get better working conditions and pay in line with inflation.

I used to be a trade union lawyer and totally sympathise with their line of argument. However, when this union official was asked if strikes could result in extra deaths their response was that extra deaths are already happening and have been happening for some years because the NHS and ambulance services are working to their maximum capacity, and are consistently failing to hit their performance targets.

Ambulance staff are to go on strike later this month

If cost of living is hitting the rest of the country, then it is also affecting these essential key workers, and they too need decent working conditions as well as decent pay.

However, if strike action results in even more excess deaths of the elderly whereby an ambulance is unable to get to them in the required time, and in some recent cases for more than seven hours, which leads to the patient’s death because they did not receive care on time, how can strikes which have the potential to compromise patient care and lead to even more deaths be justified?

I heard the interview of Dame Esther Rantzen, founder of the Silver Line in the same programme. She said that older people are reluctant to ask for help because they are proud and also because they do not wish to be a bother. This means very likely an older person when calling the emergency services will downplay their symptoms. Will this be taken into account?

When services are stretched and staff morale is low it is not beyond the realms of possibility that an older person calling 999 following a fall, will not get the care they need for say, a broken hip in a timely manner. This could be because the person calling was reluctant to stress the pain they were in, or because the staff answering the call genuinely was hard pressed to decide who to prioritise.

People in the medical profession make life and death decisions, and their hard work during the pandemic was commendable. They went out of their way to keep working even to the point of jeopardising their own personal safety to ensure the NHS was still providing essential medical care.

My question to the nurses and the paramedics is this, if the strikes result in even more deaths which could be prevented even with a ‘broken’ service, can they live with that?

There is a failure at the top or shall we say, a lack of will to mend the broken system. Yes, strikes just like the pandemic will lay bare the fault lines, but, at what cost?

The elderly once again will be the dispensable group of people, this group of people belong to a generation who have paid their dues to society, have worked hard to make ends meet, yet in their time of need we keep failing them. Somehow their liberty is not respected enough for us to want to go out on a limb and say enough is enough.

Daxa Manhar Patel is a solicitor, author and executive coach.

Ambulance strikes difficult to justify when they put elderly at risk: Daxa Patel