Nurses’ fury as cash axed
– AILEEN, 81, WARNS ABOUT CREEPING PRIVATISATION
BURSARIES have been axed for 1,000 nurses who join the profession every year via a fast-track, twoyear postgraduate course.
Unions reacted with anger last night after the Government published the change on a website.
Royal College of Nursing chief Janet Davies hit out at “another short-sighted” move that “cuts off a way of getting more nurses”.
IN a 66-year career, Britain’s oldest mental health nurse has seen big changes in the NHS, but none as worrying as the privatisation now threatening the service.
Aileen Coomber, 81, was 11 when the NHS was established in July, 1948, and she remembers what life was like without it.
She said: “I have scars on my knees from when I fell as a child, but my mother couldn’t afford to take me to the doctor.
“My young sister Katherine had pneumonia, but my mother couldn’t afford treatment and had to treat her at home. She got through it, but it was hard.
“She got leukaemia a few years later and, although she died, the care she received in the newly formed NHS was great.”
Aileen fears privatisation under the Tories is putting her cherished NHS at risk.
She said: “I feel quite sad that the NHS is being increasingly privatised. Private companies want to make a profit. Ill health should never be about profit.
“We need to value people equally and everyone should be entitled to the same healthcare.”
The gran, of Worthing, West Sussex, trained as a nursing cadet in 1951, the year before the pacemaker was invented.
She married at 18 and gave up work to care for her family and then for her daughter, Lynda, who was born 13 months later.
Returning to work at 21, Aileen was a nursing assistant for 20 years. She became a registered mental health nurse in 1976, two years before the birth of Britain’s first test-tube baby.
She still works at Shepherd House, a psychiatric unit in Worthing, and said: “I can’t imagine not going to work. If I am off sick, even for a few days, I really, really miss it.” And with an estimated 40,000 nursing vacancies in England alone, the NHS needs her. Aileen said: “I see how we have problems recruiting and retaining nurses.
“I know some student nurses and I think they feel undervalued. I went into nursing to help people, so I find the idea of it being about money difficult. I struggle seeing cutbacks to things that help people.”
Since she started work, Aileen has seen major breakthroughs including the first human heart transplant in 1967, the introduction of vaccines against measles, mumps and rubella, and the eradication of smallpox.
But Aileen still credits the NHS as the biggest benefit to our health.
She said: “I really know the value of the NHS, as I remember what life was like before it and I am worried about going back to a place where it’s not free and available for everyone.”
I know the value of the NHS because I remember what life was like before it AILEEN COOMBER BRITAIN’S OLDEST MENTAL HEALTH NURSE
BRITAIN’S oldest mental health nurse, Aileen Coomber, has dedicated her life to our most precious public service.
At 81, she shows no signs of quitting but her grave concerns about the ailing NHS show it really is in need of political intervention.