Overworked & still unable to afford food

Nurse esther: LEFTOVER FOOD KEEPS YOU GOING

EMILY RETTER Senior Feature Writer EXHAUSTED and hungry, unable to afford lunch in the hospital canteen and barely able to afford the ingredients to make a packed lunch, nurse Esther has resorted to eating patients’ leftovers during her shifts.

It is not allowed. When she has been caught she has been reprimanded, and she certainly does not want to be eating the dregs left on stained plastic trays.

But she does it to stave off the lightheadedness and hunger pangs and give her the energy to finish her shift.

And Esther, 36, from Zimbabwe, says plenty of her colleagues do the same.

With a heavy heart, Esther supports strike action for better pay, expected to be announced by the Royal College of Nursing today.

She says: “Yes, I go without meals. Lunch, sometimes breakfast. You can’t go and buy a hot meal at work, it costs £6 to £7.

“Sometimes you have to grab extra sandwiches from the patients’ trollies. Of course people will tell you it’s against hospital policy. Most of the time I do that.

“Sometimes they reprimand you, but they have not reported me. It is common to take the leftover food, even the British nurses do this. It’s only ever the leftovers, and it keeps you going.”

Esther does not want to give her full name or say where she lives and works. Many nurses are too embarrassed or nervous to talk about the hardships they face or the possibility of a strike.

The mum of three arrived in the UK last September on a visa to fill muchneeded NHS posts – 25,000 have left the nursing and midwifery register.

She was earning £26,000 at a hospital in the south of England and topped it up with overtime plus extra shifts as an agency nurse – sometimes adding as much as 36 extra hours to her working week.

But still she struggled to pay her high rent and to afford spiralling energy bills and grocery costs.

Sometimes her exhaustion and back pain is so bad she has to take ibuprofen to go to work.

She moved north as an agency worker in an NHS hospital in the hope of cheaper living conditions there.

Agency work pays more, but is less secure and involves expensive commutes, negating the extra pay.

A role in a care home would pay more, but she wants to stay with the NHS.

“There is a pride that comes with working for the NHS,” she says.

She would consider strike action, although is nervous about repercussions and sceptical of success. But she adds: “Nurses have been left with little choice.”

Sometimes you have to grab leftover food

NURSE ESTHER ON STRUGGLE TO BUY FOOD

HARD TIMES Esther has to work extra shifts