‘We can’t cope anymore’: Desperate and without any other option, these are the NHS nurses driven to strike

Nurses across, England, Northern Ireland and Wales will be on strike today as the NHS faces unprecedented levels of industrial action over pay in the next seven days.

Thousands of operations have been postponed and A&Es will run on Christmas day level staffing during the busiest time of the year.

For nurses across the country, who say they’re striking over the safety of patients who have to experience short-staffed services every day, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

The NHS’ four chief nursing officers warned nurses’ union, the Royal College of Nursing, over patient safety concerns in a letter sent on Monday.

However, nurses tell The Independent they are striking because safety has become so compromised by shortages.

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Charlie Rumary a nurse in Sussex who has been working in the NHS for 11 years said he was “really disappointed” in the chief nurses’ letter.

He said: “Safety is the key reason, why we’re all still in the job... Just generally across the country, where patient safety and patient care isn’t good enough, those of us [that] still remain within the profession are still trying to do everything we can.”

“None of us want to compromise patient safety through a strike but we are left at this point with no other option. There is nothing else coming, you know, without striking and making pay a component of a better and more sustainable workforce. That’s the only way we have to retain the people that are in the workforce and we have to encourage people to join the workforce.

“I was never going to compromise the safety of my department for a strike but I wanted to send a message to the government that the current situation isn’t acceptable.”

The NHS has 50,000 nurse vacancies across the UK, with demand higher than ever, and recent research shows nurses’ pay has decreased by 20 per cent in real terms over the past decade.

Mr Rumary said nursing was a “very tough job”. He added: “It’s fairly physically demanding, most nurses are on their feet all day. It’s absolutely mentally demanding. You’re balancing the stress of the job. You’re balancing the needs of your patients. That case takes an incredible toll. So the idea that we can, you know be on a race to the bottom for the cheapest possible workforce to do such a critical safety critical job is astounding.”

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Amanda Smith, an ICU nurse in Northern Ireland told The Independent: “I certainly wouldn’t want to go on strike, but I feel that I have to because the government isn’t listening to us. It’s not acceptable to pay agencies and to pay huge amounts of money for international nurse recruitment, and not to pay your own nurses appropriately.”

She said the NHS she sees is now “unrecognisable”.

“When I come on my shift, there’s 50 per cent agency staff. We’ve got a lot of new international nurse recruits because so many staff have left and a lot of staff are leaving because of the pay and going to the private sector, and we really need to retain our nurses in the NHS.

“A lot of nurses are working 60-hour weeks because they’re working agency shifts on top of their own shifts, but obviously that’s not sustainable over a long period of time.

“So because of the pay issues people are deciding to leave and it leads to huge gaps in our health service, the safety issues for patients.”

She explained it was difficult to work in a situation in which nurses go home having tried to do their best but knowing care hasn’t been good enough.

“You wouldn’t like your own relative to be left three days on [a] trolley before they can be admitted to hospital… and that’s the situation we’re dealing with at the moment.”

“I’ve heard of nurses coming off their shift crying… because they can’t cope with it anymore because of the lack of resources and lack of sufficient numbers of staff to care for these patients.”

Another London nurse said: “I have student nurses... I had a conversation a couple of weeks ago, [with one] who is wanting to sleep in her car overnight because she couldn’t afford to drive home and back on the petrol.

“If someone asked me why I’m striking, of course, people are going to say ‘yes, it’s also [about]pay’, but the main reason we’re doing this is that we go into our job to look after other people and we’re not doing that very well at the moment because of the lack of staffing, the lack of investment into nursing. It’s having a massive impact on our patients.”

It is “atrocious” and “morally unjust” to have staff in this position.

He added: “The real reason why we can’t provide that care and why I’m having to stand there and apologise [and say], ‘I’m sorry that your mother hasn’t been washed today or that she hasn’t had her medications on time’, which has had an impact on her care. Or that she hasn’t been discharged home yet and she’s got worse… I wouldn’t be saying that if we’d had an investment in nursing. “