Government must act to help health staff

READERS will be aware of the severe and well-documented pressures currently being experienced in health and social care services.

Many of our members in the Royal College of Nursing are struggling physically and emotionally. Their desire is, as always, to provide the safest and highest standard of care despite relentlessly demanding workloads and chronic staffing shortages.

It would be easy to blame the current staffing pressures on the Covid-19 pandemic – a combination of more patients needing treatment and surging staff absence due to illness and isolation.

The sad truth is that the current problems have been a long time in the making. For more than a decade we have been warning that the NHS and wider health and care system is so short of nursing staff that patients do not always receive the quality of care they expect and deserve.

The shortages have been compounded by the loss of nurses from EU countries, the fall in the number of nurses qualifying between 2016 and 2020 due to the Government’s reckless removal of the NHS bursary for health care students in England and the continuing lack of a coherent plan to retain experienced but exhausted nurses as well as recruit new ones.

Nurses don’t go into nursing to deliver care that they know, deep down, is below the standard they want to provide. Unfortunately, high demand and extremely depleted capacity only heighten the risk of this happening.

The reality is that, right now, many staff are facing unsustainable pressure to care for all their patients promptly and properly, many are being redeployed to unfamiliar settings to fill the most urgent staffing gaps, many are anxious about their best not being good enough and many of those who are off sick or isolating feel guilty they’re not beside their overworked colleagues.

As resilient as nursing and other health care workers have repeatedly proved themselves to be, the limit has been reached and this latest stage of the pandemic has truly exposed the Government’s negligence in ensuring effective workforce planning and supply.

The very least the workforce deserves is for this oversight to be addressed immediately, and even if it is, we fear it may be too late to keep many nurses in our profession after their experiences of the past two years.

Please contact your MP and support us as we continue to demand meaningful action by the Government to ensure safe staffing across the whole health and care system. Ian Graham

Chair East Midlands Royal College of Nursing