With the general election less than a month away, much attention has been focussed on the state of Britain’s National Health Service, whose winter crisis this year was so severe that the Red Cross warned at the time of a “humanitarian crisis”. In recent weeks, particular consideration is being given to nursing. Last weekend, a survey conducted by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) found that 78% supported strike action over the coming summer, while over 90% backed industrial action of other forms. While industrial action would require a formal ballot, the survey highlighted the grave situation facing the nursing profession. Britain’s nurses have gone on strike only once (in 2014) in the past 134 years.

A government-led austerity drive has capped public sector wage rises at 1% over the past two years and with freezes before that, the RCN estimates that nurses have suffered an effective real 14% pay cut in the past seven years, leaving many in extremely difficult conditions. It also emerged — much to public concern — that some nurses have had to turn to food banks, which distribute short-term supplies to those unable to buy enough to ward off hunger and also to pay-day loans on high interest rates. “We have nurses going to food banks, that must be wrong?” Andrew Marr, a prominent BBC TV presenter, asked Prime Minister Theresa May during an interview last month. Ms. May’s answer — that there were “complex” reasons for nurses turning to food banks — was condemned by political opponents, though the issue has not been confined to the Conservatives. Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon was also forced to defend Scotland’s maintenance of the cap on public pay, despite the fact that some nurses in that country were also reported to be turning to food banks.

Rising workload

The issue of pay has come at a time when the workload on nurses has increased substantially. “For a nurse, demand and pressure at work have spiralled upwards at the very moment that pay has gone the other way. Nurses are being asked to work longer and harder, staying on well beyond their shifts even when they’ve already worked 12 hours flat to give patients the care they deserve, before going home exhausted,” the RCN warned recently.

A combination of factors has led to a severe staffing crisis. The RCN estimates that there are around 40,000 nursing posts vacant in England alone, exacerbated by changes in immigration rules that made it harder for nurses from outside the EU (India included) to come to Britain. Nursing has been added to a list of shortage occupations, meaning it will be easier to recruit from outside the EU but it’s a temporary measure and holds little appeal for nurses who are likely to have far better opportunities in their home country or elsewhere, says Dr. Kailash Chand, a noted NHS campaigner and former deputy head of the British Medical Association. He says the current government is “ideologically opposed” to a publicly funded health system. “I can safely say in my 30 years in the NHS, I have not seen a crisis in the nursing profession of this scale,” he told The Hindu, pointing out that patient safety was on the line in the crisis.

Potentially making things even harder is Brexit, which could result in the nursing profession losing the tens of thousands of EU nurses who work in the NHS. There are already reports that the number of EU nurses leaving the service is rising dramatically. What role the state of the nursing profession — and the NHS — more widely plays in the election remains to be seen though recent polls have suggested that it is among the issues considered most significant by the public.