Take cap off for nurses
My kneecaps have given up the ghost
WHEN I was five my mum gave me one of her frilly nurse’s caps and a little red case packed with bandages and plasters.
“Playing hospitals” was my favourite game – strapping up Mr Ted’s sprained ankle or giving my big brother pretend medicine.
I grew up dreaming of becoming a real nurse, perhaps even a Night Sister like Mum. I started my training in 1982 on an annual salary, less nursing home rent, of £3,000 – about £10,500 today.
But I didn’t last the year. Within weeks I knew I didn’t have the character or the stomach to become a nurse. My “vocation” was simply a desire to emulate Mum, who adored her career and was a natural carer.
Medical advances mean nursing has changed hugely in the 35 years since I bailed out.
What hasn’t changed is the appalling pay. In 1982 nurses marched on London demanding a pay rise as 13 NHS unions took industrial action.
The nurses didn’t strike and eventually got their rise and a new pay review body.
But their salaries have never, truly, rewarded the amazing job they do. And now Theresa May and the Tories are actively punishing them for their vocation.
A miserly one per cent pay cap for public sector jobs hits all frontline workers.
But in the past seven years nurses’ salaries have plummeted by 14 per cent in real terms while rent, food and utility bills have rocketed. They’re now £3,000 a year worse off than in 2010 and they’re struggling. Some are turning to food banks to feed their families. So they are quitting in droves.
For the first time ever more UK nurses and midwives are leaving the profession than joining. There’s a shortfall of 40,000 nurses and 3,500 midwives in England alone.
And Royal College of Nursing head Janet Davies fears the haemorrhage will continue. She said: “When a senior MP was recentlyy asked how a ten per cent pay rise for MPss was afforded, he said it had been a salary ‘correction’.
“Nurses are waiting for the same correction after a 14 per cent real-terms pay cut. The Government must lift this s cap and close the gap on lost t earnings.” They must and theyy can. Mrs May whines that she e hasn’t got a “magic money tree” yet she found a £1billion bung for the DUP and billions more for corporation tax cuts. Some callous Conservatives actually cheered when a Labour motion to lift the pay cap was defeated.
One of the 313 Tories who opposed the move was Victoria Prentis, MP for Banbury, Oxfordshire, who was re- elected after campaigning to save the Horton Hospital, where my mum nursed for 35 years.
She agrees it’s vital that public sector workers are treated fairly but said “the amendment was made with very little notice, allowing no opportunity for any of us to look at the implications in sufficient detail”.
Rubbish. They know the implications of NOT lifting the cap – more nurses quitting. The Tories need to stop pretending they’re playing fair. And raise their hospital game.