Jessica said the last few months have been "extremely tough" for her nursing colleagues, with many making huge personal sacrifices to do the jobs they love.

"At the start of the pandemic, me and my partner made the really difficult decision to send my six-year-old daughter to live with her grandparents," she explained.

"They are my childcare for me to come to work, so I was terrified of passing Covid onto both her and my parents.

"As you can imagine this was the hardest thing I've ever had to do as a mother. When I left her she was crying in the window and I wasn't able to comfort her. It was heartbreaking."

She then had to witness many of her friends and fellow staff members being struck down with the virus.

"You couldn't help but think 'am I going to be next?' It was just awful," she said.

She described the government's decision to exclude nurses from the public sector pay rise as "a massive blow".

"Once again, the hard work that we do daily was being overlooked. We work tirelessly in our roles, and that's not just through this pandemic," she said.

"Yet again the government continue to make us feel undervalued. Enough is enough.

"We have been taken advantage of for far too long. We are being held over a moral barrel as they know that we won't just get up and leave because we care about our patients too much."

She added: "We are professionals with degree-level qualifications. We work in busy, demanding jobs with huge responsibilities. All we ask for is fair pay for what we do.

"And we're not just doing this for nurses. We're doing it for healthcare support workers, for the Welsh Ambulance Service, for porters and more.

"We have felt like this for the past decade after years of pay freezes and being excluded from increments. Covid has just been the driving force for nurses to fight for this much-needed pay rise."

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