My father was a GP in Southgate Crawley. My mother was a nurse. They had both seen the beginning of the NHS in 1948 and they had both lived without it. They saw first-hand the difference this incredible service made to lives.

I was born in the NHS in 1958 and trained as a nurse in 1977 then worked for many years in a variety of roles within NHS. I have never known anything else.

All nurses will have a case or two in their career that stays with them. A shift where they feel they failed a patient, often for no fault of their own.

Mine was a night shift and a patent in his 80s who had had major cancer surgery that day but whose wife had died unexpectedly while he was under anaesthetic. I so wanted to sit down and have a cup of tea with him in the night, but it was crazy busy and I simply didn’t manage it. He died the next day. I still remember him, I remember his face.

Today, talking to nurses that I know, they face situations like this on most shifts. They know what to do, they know how to care well, but they are so short staffed they regularly cannot meet their own expectations.

I don’t think I could do that.

For the last 12 years nurses have borne the brunt of austerity with a pay freeze that has seen their earnings go down by over 20% in real terms. They have also had to manage with decreasing resources. In the first 70 years of the NHS, the average annual budget rise was 3.7%, between 2009/10 and 2018/19, the average funding growth each year was just 1.5%. The pressure that put on nurses ability to meet their patients’ needs is huge[i]. Today, many nurses rely on food banks and have to accept the limitations on the care they can give their patients.

What are they meant to do?

Every day more and more are leaving the profession they love because they cannot afford mentally or financially to stay. They can earn more in plenty of jobs that don’t carry the stress levels.

The more nurses that leave the NHS the more dysfunctional it becomes and the greater the burden on those who remain, creating a downward spiral in staff retention and causing services to become ever more dangerous for patents.

It’s not nurses striking that’s dangerous – it’s failing to pay them or fund the NHS fairly.

In my entire life it has never occurred to me that the NHS wouldn’t be there if me or mine needed it. It does now.

In 1997, after 18 years in power, the Tories promised, if re-elected, to reduce NHS waiting lists to 18 MONTHS. In just 13 years from 1997 to 2010 Labour reduced all NHS waiting lists to 18 WEEKS and it had its highest satisfaction rating ever, with all cancer (and other) targets heading in the right direction.

That’s what this Tory government inherited on David Cameron’s 2010 election promise of “no top down re-organisation of the NHS” and that the NHS “is safe in our hands”. Yet in 2010, Cameron’s Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley embarked on the biggest ever re-organisation of the NHS. It was bungled, cost billions, is generally considered to have achieved nothing and is therefore rarely referred to. Lansley was sent to the House of Lords.

Since 2010, the Tories haven’t just bought the NHS to its knees, it’s on its back in resus. Waiting times are off the scale, ambulance response times are terrifying, staff shortages are rife, cancer waiting times are chilling and general waiting lists are at an all-time high. GPs surgeries, including the one where I used to live are being bought up by US healthcare giants and you can’t get to see a GP anyway.

People are dying.

This is not due to Covid, though of course it didn’t help, all these indicators were appalling before the pandemic.

Nurses have to strike, not just to protect themselves, but to protect the NHS and to protect all of us.

No Nurse has taken this decision lightly, and it will pain them greatly if it happens. But we should go out of our way to show our support, now is the time to go on our doorsteps and clap – because, as ever, they are on our side and fighting for us all.

Cllr Alison Cornell

County Councillor for Langley Green and Ifield East

[i] The Kings Fund – The NHS Budget and how it has changed – https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-budget