The durability of a pathology network just two months into its new structure was put to the test when biomedical experts at Royal Blackburn and Burnley General hospitals went on strike for 20 days in June and July over a disagreement about vacation compensation. Unite members staged four separate five-day blocks, from 15 to 19 June, 22 to 26 June, 29 June to 3 July and 6 to 10 July, disrupting the processing of routine and urgent blood tests ordered by hospital departments and GP surgeries across East Lancashire.
The dispute centres on how holiday pay is calculated for staff whose earnings vary by shift. Biomedical scientists in the department work irregular patterns that include nights and weekends, and by law their holiday pay must reflect average earnings rather than basic pay alone. An earlier employment tribunal found in favour of a single member of staff on this point, establishing that the calculation used by the former employer, East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust, had shortchanged workers taking leave. Unite says that ruling was never applied to the rest of the workforce, leaving staff owed sums the union puts at thousands of pounds each.
What turned a long-running grievance into strike action was a change of employer. On 1 April, pathology services across Lancashire and South Cumbria were brought together under a single lead employer, Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, absorbing staff and services previously run separately by Blackpool Teaching Hospitals, East Lancashire Hospitals and University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay. Under TUPE regulations, LTH inherited not only the workforce but the unresolved grievance attached to it. Staff at LTH's own sites, Royal Preston and Chorley and South Ribble, were unaffected by the walkout, as were hospitals in Blackpool and Lancaster, underlining that the dispute travelled with the transferred workforce rather than the new employer's existing practice.
Unite's regional officer, Helen Flanagan, said staff had lost confidence in management and had exhausted other options before balloting for action. The union's general secretary, Sharon Graham, described the trust's handling of the matter as disgraceful, arguing that staff already under strain from workforce shortages in biomedical science were being made to fight for pay they were legally owed. LTH said the TUPE transfer had brought four organisations into a single co-ordinated network on 1 April, and that colleagues who had raised a grievance with their former employer would have that grievance heard through an appeal process due to take place towards the end of June.
Behind the picket lines, contingency planning focused on keeping diagnostic turnaround intact. Samples from East Lancashire were rerouted to pathology sites not affected by the action, with the network drawing on capacity across its wider footprint and, where necessary, sourcing additional external laboratory support. Unite warned throughout that significant delays to tests and procedures were likely regardless of these workarounds, given the volume of routine and urgent bloodwork that passes through the two hospitals.
The episode lands at an awkward moment for pathology consolidation nationally. Lord Carter's 2026 review of pathology transformation, welcomed by the Institute of Biomedical Science, called for the completion of network integration alongside stronger workforce planning, arguing that pathology underpins the great majority of patient pathways and that delays ripple into cancer diagnosis, emergency care and elective waiting lists. The Lancashire experience illustrates a risk that sits underneath the efficiency case for these networks. When services merge under a single lead employer, the new organisation inherits not just staff and equipment but whatever unresolved industrial relations problems travelled with them, without necessarily inheriting the authority or incentive to settle them quickly. For trusts elsewhere in England now working through similar lead employer arrangements, Lancashire offers a case study in what can go wrong when legal liabilities are transferred alongside a workforce and treated as someone else's unfinished business.
