Nurses are the backbone of the NHS – the government must pay them fairly

I am writing to discuss the latest nursing strikes and situation currently in the news about Great Ormond Street Hospital.

I am a nurse at GOSH and see first-hand the level of commitment and hard work from nurses both here and throughout the entire NHS.

First, I should say we don’t want to strike. We care deeply about our patients, their safety and their wellbeing. We want to be at work to do our jobs to care for them.

However, the reason we are having to strike is they are put in danger daily due to unsafe staffing conditions. This is due to years of austerity, funding cuts and nursing pay freezes.

Nurses go to university for three years to train, and most of us leave in huge debt, with little hope of ever earning much over £30,0000.

Nursing is a hard job: long shifts, nights, weekends, bank holidays and Christmas. Missing family gatherings and social events with friends. Constant exhaustion from being on your feet all day, having few breaks. Being with sick, stressed patients and their families for hours on end.

It’s also highly skilled and technical. If you need a blood transfusion, a nurse will give it, if you need dialysis, a nurse will do it, if you need help breathing or even full resuscitation it’s very likely a nurse will do it. Nurses put in catheters and give lifesaving infusions, we manage emergency situations and deal with people in their absolute darkest moments.

Who might I ask wants to do a job where they don’t get to go to the toilet for 10 hours, where they barely ever get their full break, where they get home barely able to stand and all that alongside losing your social life and having a tonne of debt from university?

We do! Because we love our patients, and the feeling we get from helping them every day. For the past two weeks, the senior nursing team at GOSH have been attending meetings, speaking to staff, and making detailed plans. Most of them are going to be out on the wards working through the strike despite wanting to strike themselves.

There’s now been a critical incident declared as despite all this planning, most of the nurses want to strike. No other workforce can cover us because the nurses are the backbone of the NHS. Without us patients die, and still the government refuse to pay us fairly.

The hospital has been offering £45 an hour for nurses to work agency shifts during the strike. The problem is that this is more than double what we’re usually paid, and is clearly an indicator of what we are worth! This is what we should be paid every day, not just because they are desperate!

This government cut nursing bursaries, putting many older students off training. They put in place years of pay freezes, and they did not increase NHS spending with inflation. This combined with increasingly expensive and complex new drugs and treatments available for rare and not so rare diseases… it’s no wonder the NHS is crumbling!

This needs to change! Pay us fairly and fund our NHS properly!

Anonymous

Address supplied

The most disheartening and depressing aspect of the long, drawn-out resignation of Richard Sharp is our meek routine acceptance of it as just another “event” in the vile world of politics. No day passes without yet another grubby episode landing to take the place of the previous one: Rwanda, Raab, Labour’s offensive personal attacks on Rishi Sunak, the financial carnage at the SNP; the list goes on.

Where are the decent, clever, bright souls with a flicker of charisma and genuine desire to serve the nation and make things better? Our rulers are invariably either hobbled by class, money, or their own colossal egos and have no empathy or understanding of the ordinary voter.

Steve Mackinder

Denver

Yet again we see Boris Johnson tainted in yet another scandal from his time as prime minister.

This time it is regarding an £800,000 loan facilitated to Johnson by a former BBC chairman which was not properly disclosed when he applied for the job. Surely this is a conflict of interest that needs examining further.

Surely this also exposes Rishi Sunak as being a weak prime minister; in office, but not in power.

And surely, just like the appointment of Suella Braverman as home secretary was designed to keep the right wing of the Conservative Party happy, so too Rishi Sunak’s refusal to sack Richard Sharp shows a clear lack of leadership caused by yet more fear of upsetting the Tory right wing.

Geoffrey Brooking

Hampshire

The never-ending rash of public sector strikes should signal that the government needs a radical change in its approach to protecting its assets. Those assets are, in large part, the teachers, nurses, doctors and other public sector workers who have been trained at great public expense and who are crucial to the future success of the nation.

Instead of shoring up trouble by continually awarding sub-inflationary annual pay rises so that levels of remuneration are eroded year by year, government should be looking ahead and offering salary increases that keep pace with inflation. Anything less shows how little it values its most important asset – its human resource – and, as we see in our present time of troubles, the resolution of pay disputes becomes increasingly difficult.

Ian Reid

Kilnwick