Health minister Konstanty Radziwiłł has appealed to nurses to lift a strike in Warsaw and “return to the bedsides” of children, after talks hit a stumbling block. “I ask the nurses to return to the bedsides and take care of seriously ill children patients who need it,” the PAP news agency quoted Radziwiłł as saying on Monday.

Nurses at the Children’s Memorial Health Institute in Warsaw are on an indefinite strike over pay and conditions that has lasted a week.

The facility is one of Poland’s largest specialist paediatric hospitals.

Radziwiłł said that “no child will be harmed” because of the strike, although he admitted that he realises “that children, and especially their parents, do not feel safe at this time”.