Nurses’ chief earning £180,000 a year is no stranger to the picket line
‘If you want to use your voice, remember, we will support you to use your voice’
Dame Ruth May is a woman who is not afraid to pick fights. In 2020, England’s chief nursing officer was dropped from the Downing Street daily Covid briefings after apparently failing to back Dominic Cummings in dress rehearsals.
Her stance came at the peak of public fury over Mr Cummings’s decision to drive from London to Durham during lockdown when his wife was suspected of having Covid.
Ministers and No 10 denied reports that Dame Ruth was stood down because of the rehearsal, with the PM’S aides suggesting she might have been stuck in traffic. Later, Dame Ruth confirmed that she had been dropped, diplomatically adding “that happened to many of my colleagues as well”.
As 100,000 nurses prepare to take to picket lines in two weeks, the health official does not intend to stand back again.
Pointedly, the senior nurse, who earns more than £180,000 per year, has reminded colleagues that as a student nurse she herself took part in strikes in the 1980s.
History notes that those strikes – in February 1988 – were denounced by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), which then had a no-strike policy.
Two per cent of nurses were estimated to have taken part in that industrial action, which was orchestrated by the National Union of Public Employees (now consolidated into Unison), and 200 operations had to be postponed.
This week, as the RCN gears up for the first national strike in its history, thousands of operations and outpatients’ appointments are likely to be postponed.
The union says up to 100,000 nurses will take industrial action at 76 locations, starting on Thursday.
Dame Ruth has expressed support for those planning strikes, saying she used her “voice as a student nurse, and I was on the picket line” in the 1980s at the Royal Gwent Hospital in Wales.
Last month, she told delegates at the Royal College of Midwives conference: “If you want to use your voice, remember, we will support you to use your voice.”
The health official said her job is to support all nurses, whether or not they decide to take industrial action. “We’ve got your backs,” she told nurses, in an interview with Nursing Times.
She added that she would visit nurses, whether or not they were forming picket lines.
“I will continue my visits and I will, of course, continue to talk to nurses wherever they are,” she said.
The health official, aged 55, who was born in Wales, worked her way up the nursing ranks, becoming a theatre sister, and hospital head of nursing before becoming an NHS trust chief executive, and taking a succession of posts in NHS administration.
The year before the pandemic, she became chief nursing officer for England and as Covid spread, she became one of the NHS “faces” who presented daily news conferences.
Ministers have repeatedly said demands for a 19 per cent pay rise are not affordable, with Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, describing them as “unreasonable”.
But Dame Ruth told Nursing Times: “Clearly, nurses and midwives have used their voice and we do have organisations now that are given a mandate for taking and considering industrial action.
“Now, my job … I’ll say now and I’ll say it in the future, is to support all the nurses, whether they have used their voice to not take industrial action, or whether they have used their voice to take industrial action. My job is to support them throughout this time.”