With district nurses in crisis, this is Boris Johnson’s chance to prove his commitment to the NHS

When our elected representatives want to play politics with the health service – something we saw more than a little of during the general election campaign – they throw unfettered praise upon the dedicated and undoubtedly “hard-working” men and women of the NHS. We saw it yet again in the Christmas messages of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn; both men chose to praise the doctors, nurses and other public servants who eschew festivities with their own loved ones to dedicate their time to the service of others.

It seems, for the prime minister at least, that those sentiments are rather easier to say than to act upon. Nursing may be among the most respected professions – for many, it may be better described as a calling – but it is also ranked among the least well-funded. But current funding arrangements are not sustaining the important, and broad, role that nurses working in the community play in supporting the wider health service by keeping patients out of hospital corridors.

As The Independent reports today, the service provided by community nurses is now beginning to crumble. District nurses are being forced to work an extra day of unpaid overtime each week to stay on top of their workloads. There are now simultaneous vacancies and recruitment freezes in place in three-quarters of district nursing teams, and the number of nurses working in these roles has dropped by almost half in 10 years.

The warning sounded by the nursing profession’s leaders about the seriousness of the situation should be heeded with urgency. Though their job title may sound somewhat provincial, the work that district nurses carry out is skilled, complex and essential. It includes managing medications, wound care, supporting families where patients have multiple diagnoses with home treatments, and compassionate palliative care in the final days and hours of life.

District nurses are already working under intense pressure. The planned improvements in NHS hospital care – which will require more people to be treated outside of hospital, to improve standards and outcomes for those who do need to be admitted – will simply not be possible if we expect community nurses to be able to pick up the slack. As we see today, at current staffing levels they cannot.

During an election campaign in which Boris Johnson faced flimsy opposition from a fractured and poorly led Labour Party, the only time the prime minister looked to be on the ropes was when confronted with the image of a sick child forced to rest on the floor of a Leeds hospital because there was no bed available for him. The NHS is the sacred cow of the British electorate; if Johnson wishes to shore up his newly acquired support in the former Labour heartlands of the midlands and northeast of England, he must show a commitment to those people inside our health services whose jobs are becoming untenable under their current workload. At this level of overwork, costly mistakes will be made and no doubt some poor citizens will pay the ultimate price.

To thrive and survive, the NHS must not only be committed to funding treatments and projects at the cutting edge of medical progress – though that is of course crucial work – but listen to the voices of those who are propping up the system from the bottom up. The alternative is to see a generation of skilled professionals vote with their feet, and find work where an unpaid day of overtime is not an unfortunate requirement of the job.