Day in the life of a nurse
My day / night shift is 12-13 hours long. I check and administer medicines, support patients and their families, and run around looking for resources that should be readily available. With winter arriving, my days will become even busier.
I will likely leave late, missing my breaks because staffing is so bad. My feet will swell, my hands will crack, and my mind will be weary by the end of this. The state of staffing and availability of resources is abysmal, leading to chronically unsafe environments for patients.
Our care is taken for granted by the capitalist system. We work shifts that take years off our lives. Some shifts are so unsafe it puts our patients at risk of death, which makes us feel as though we haven’t cared for people with the dignity they are entitled to.
When faced with these ever-worsening conditions, and facing a 25 percent loss in real-term wages since 2010, of course we chose to reject Labour’s pitiful 5.5 percent pay ‘award’!
And with staff being valued so poorly by successive governments, no wonder there is a huge exodus of NHS nurses.
Labour have shown they are no different from the Tories. By undervaluing NHS staff, and continuing a campaign of austerity and privatisation, they only endanger the lives of the public more. We are for people, not profit!
An angry NHS worker
“Bulldoze the bureaucrats”?
Amongst Wes Streeting’s sweeping statements about what needs to be done to save the NHS, the Labour health secretary has talked about “bulldozing bureaucracy”.
We should be wary of any words coming from this pro-privatisation Blairite, however. His definition of bureaucracy is a bit different from that of hospital staff on the ground.
What Streeting means is slashing key roles and reducing the influence of the unions – not getting rid of highly-paid executives and bosses who do nothing but syphon much-needed funds out of our healthcare system.
On the one hand, we have the clinical, admin, and estates staff who work hard to deliver patient care. On the other, we have a layer of managers whose job is to enforce targets.
These managers don’t need to have clinical training, only the ability and willingness to carry out the diktats of those above them.
We are constantly faced with orders from senior managers in their ivory towers, who have never set up an intravenous fluid drip nor consoled a distressed patient; or if they have, they have not done so for many years.
One mental health bed manager asked a colleague to free up eight beds out of a total of twenty – completely ignoring the risks of prematurely discharging patients!
What the NHS needs is proper funding, the reversal of all outsourcing and privatisation, and democratic workers’ control: ward and clinic leadership from elected representatives, on the average wage of a health worker, and subject to recall!
Reema Malhotra, NHS resident doctor
Digital paperwork
One of Wes Streeting’s solutions to “fix” the NHS is to “streamline” services.
This streamlining includes attempts to implement a digital shift: integrating IT systems; moving information online; and providing patient records electronically. Furthermore, these changes and ‘reforms’ will supposedly cost nothing.
This attempt to go paperless has been going on for at least 18 months in my workplace. Yet I spend as much time doing paperwork now, if not more. Despite the ‘digital shift’, I still put in around 1-2 hours per shift filling out forms, etc.
On a few occasions, I have had to write patient observations on the back of my glove, in order to later log them on an out-of-power iPad. People simply forget to charge these devices – because they are so overworked and bogged down by paperwork!
Capitalist politicians throw billions into Trident, or at Israel or Ukraine. But they want to fix the NHS for free?
Streamlining services won’t work without any funding. And any transformation in healthcare won’t work if carried out from the top. We simply cannot trust these crooks with our NHS.
Sam Apao, Norwich
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