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How Britain Broke Another Nurse

 

This is an open letter to anyone and everyone with an opinion of the nursing profession,

 

I woke up this morning to my partner arriving home from her third nightshift in a row so far this week. She is an NHS Staff Nurse, a kind, caring and selfless person who loves her patients. She usually takes night shifts in her stride but today she had an exhaustion in her eyes that cannot be attributed to just work.

 

She had read a great many things on social media that had pushed her to breaking point. There has been much discussion on twitter and facebook regarding the initial 1% pay rise for nurses proposed by the government. Where last year, we in the nursing profession had the support of the public, we apparently do not any more.

 

There were comments ranging from “You don't get into nursing for the money,” to “Be grateful you have a job,” and “You don't deserve pay for making tiktok video's.” Some of the comment's were too vile to quote, but one horrible person even said that nurses 'deserved to get covid, for choosing to work in covid areas.'

 

As a long time healthcare worker myself, I am well aware of the hardships that fully qualified nurses go through. Where once, people supported (term used very loosely) the NHS through their clapping, apparently they don't give a damn any more.

 

Nurses were severely underpaid before the pandemic, and with the even greater challenges they now face, we find proof that nobody really cares at all. The general consensus was to 'stop complaining and get on with it.'

 

There are a significant number of people, that earned more at home on furlough than an average nurse did for working through the pandemic. My partner said that she realised that we would only ever be “just nurses” to the rest of the world, and that people would never respect us.

 

I could see it in my partner's eyes, her love of the job was gone. The British public had broken another nurse.

 

It is true that most nurses do not get into nursing for the money, they tend to be selfless and caring people who want to help others. But this is often drained out of them by a toxic situation of being in a job that is so poorly respected that the general public do not even care that it is one of the worst paid graduate jobs in the country. They also don't seem to care that even after spending 3-4 years at university, nurses are still treated like second class citizens in their own place of work.

 

Your every action is scrutinised. The slightest miscalculation or misjudgement (even if caused by work related stress and fatigue) can result in being disciplined/suspended/fired/ struck off. I saw a nurse face disciplinary action for a minor drug error that occurred as a result of being forced to cover twice as many patients as she was legally allowed to in a very busy acute unit. And if you are abused by a patient or family member, management's response is often “What could YOU do differently to avoid this next time?” These are just a small example of the hardships faced by registered nurses every single day.

 

I have seen many nurses go from enthusiastic new starts, to hating their job within a few years. Indeed, I have also seen a lot of nurses leave the profession all together, because it simply isn't worth the stress and hardship. Then the public complain about a shortage of nurses...

 

People often draw similarities between the position of teacher's and nurses, both being very under respected and under funded, as well as asking for an appropriate wage. To give context: last year Point 1 on the Main Scale for Teachers was over £32,000 where as a newly qualified staff nurse earned a little over £25,000 standard rate. I'm saying this NOT to create conflict nor contest between us and our public sector colleagues in teacher but to demonstrate the following point:

 

Nurses feel they cannot strike en mass without the risk to patient's health. Teacher's can (for the most part) strike without the risk to people's health as a result. (And the government know this all too well when setting the budget).

 

Nurse's don't want to be rich, they just want to be respected.

 

I would like to finish by clarifying the point of this letter. I am not asking for political upheaval, nor am I commenting on whether or not nurses should take industrial action.

 

I am asking you, the public, to support nurses. They are only human and just as fragile as the rest of us, and yet somehow manage to do a lot more than most of us could ever manage.

 

To take someone who's only desire is to help others, and beat that out of them, is an act of vile cruelty. I hope this letter will make you think twice before saying such hurtful things from behind your keyboards in future. You might not care about nurses, but one day you will care about the lack of them.