We publish here an extended letter from a Socialist Appeal supporter and nurse within the NHS, who describes the shambolic conditions that have developed within the National Health Service as a result of years of underfunding and mismanagement by the Tories. As the junior doctors continue with all-out strike action, the letter is a poignant reminder of the need to fight to defend the NHS.
We publish here an extended letter from a Socialist Appeal supporter and nurse within the NHS, who describes the shambolic conditions that have developed within the National Health Service as a result of years of underfunding and mismanagement by the Tories. As the junior doctors continue with all-out strike action, the letter is a poignant reminder of the need to fight to defend the NHS.
I have just witnessed the disgusting spectacle of Michael – Mr Personality – Gove telling the nation how the Tory government would have so much more money to spend on the NHS if we leave the EU. Gove, himself a leading and hated voice in the Tory Party, has also been a long standing member of the Tory cabinet, a minister in two governments, which has presided over one of the most corrosive six year periods in the whole history of the NHS.
There are excellent and heart warming programmes on the TV about a more or less idyllic life in British hospitals, in casualty, or on the wards; and nice tales as they are – about workplace flirtations, solutions being found to domestic and personal problems, and staff finding their pathway to a successful and rewarding career – they do not show the true reality, which I and my colleagues live every shift…and it is not pretty.
Permit me to tell you what life is really like, as a working nurse in the NHS, which is said to be “safe” in Tory hands.
“The choice we make”
Last night I found myself working on a ward of five separate bays, plus four side rooms, and with only three staff. A fourth member was eventually found, by robbing another ward, which was (unexpectedly) adequately staffed. However, grateful as we were at this addition, the minimum safety number for this trauma ward is five: two trained nurses and three nurse auxiliaries. This cheese-paring for staff is not unusual in the modern NHS, and other wards phoned to ask if we could spare anyone, they being in the same parlous state as ourselves.
In the past three months I have been punched, kicked, scratched, bitten and spat at; and these are not isolated incidents – they occur most nights when dealing with dementia and with frightened and confused patients. I have also had to defend other staff members from vicious physical attacks, and the choice generally means placing yourself in acute danger, or leaving someone else to face the same danger alone. When it comes to dealing single handed with a bay of six elderly demented patients, who threaten and attack us, that, we are told, is the job we have. It is the choice we make!
My experience of 16 years hand-to-hand combat on the wards has developed and conditioned me to being able to deal with just about any confrontation, be it from a 6’4″ inch gorilla, with muscles in his piss, trying to punch my lights out in the dark, to a spiteful old woman who pulls a sopping and heavy incontinence pad out of her knickers to whack me over the head with it – the weight of it alone nearly laying me out. In the latter case, having a shower, cleaning my teeth and putting on fresh scrubs got me back to rights and able to continue work, whilst the former put me in casualty with a suspected broken jaw and off work for a fortnight, despite the fact that I did finally manage to get the situation under control – at some cost.
It sickens me to learn that many of my colleagues, good nurses, great nurses, nurses of many years experience, go off the wards in tears, or even at times break down openly at work, because they simply cannot cope. Many are left with the sour feeling that they have not been able to do the best for their patients, in terms of providing care, comfort and safety. Lives of vulnerable patients rest in their hands and they have been robbed by the Tories of the essential resources to give adequate care.
My senior staff nurse last night had tears in her eyes for most of the shift, because of the sheer weight in responsibility and stress and with so many poorly patients. She was very close to being overwhelmed.
The tragedy of austerity
Morale in the NHS is now at an all time low. We have too few staff, poor or insufficient equipment, shortage of consumables and often a shortage of bedding and gowns – just try and find a spare pillow to give that added ounce of comfort to a dying patient. If it was not so tragic, we would be hysterical.
We have lost hundreds of hospital beds, meaning that when there is an influx of patients, patients are moved about the hospital into the early hours of the morning – 2am is not unusual – and one poor elderly and confused man was moved no less than five times in a 12 hour period, finally coming to rest at 2.30am back where he had started at 2pm the previous afternoon. It is an embarrassment.
When an acute shortage of beds is recognised, our managers open new wards – not purpose built wards of course, but areas previously serving as store places or some other purpose. A ward isn’t just a collection of beds, it is a complete and interconnected medical centre. Often there is no oxygen and no proper treatment room, no call bells – not even the requisite number of bedside tables in some cases. Stores are in chaos and staff spend many hours spitting barbed wire because they cannot find anything. Sometimes a patient’s life can hang on a few seconds, when specific items connected with their care, must be found quickly. Beds may also be brought up from the garage where they are stored, covered in dust and which have to be cleaned down – by the ward staff – before they can be used.
There is a traffic light system for categorising degrees of crisis: Green means all is well; Amber is a warning that resources could become overwhelmed, with consequences to patient safety and care; Red signals we have reached the limit beyond which our resources will be overwhelmed; and Black means the limit has been breached and patient safety is now compromised. I have never seen a black traffic light – but levity aside, we struck the black limit at least three times in the past year; we were on red alert much of the time; and on amber most of the time. Green is a happy land, with rivers of chocolate and children with smiling faces, which you only ever see when you are dead!
Our worthy managers have struggled might and mane to eliminate the possibility of further black alerts, and after what must have been a very good and long glue sniffing party, they decided to forbid the bed managers from issuing black alerts. Problem solved! Take this as a measure of the anger which is brewing among our nurses. There is universal hatred and contempt for hospital managers, and that is a recipe for sudden and decisive action. I have never seen such anger and resentment in our hospital. Managers and others take note!
Tory shambles
The NHS has become a complete shambles under the Tories, starved of cash and given unreachable targets. That is the Tories method: tie a service down; choke and starve it of cash; drive numbers of it’s best staff out of the job – abroad and to other work; then show the nation that it does not work. Incidentally I know of at least one long-standing trained member of staff locally who has applied for work at Aldi. “You don’t get physically attacked behind the checkout at Aldi.” She said. “It means a drop in pay, but the relief at getting out of this shit hole is well worth the loss.” That nurse, by the way, is one of the most gentle and dedicated people I have ever known, one of the old breed who put their private lives second to the service. She often worked well beyond her shift in order to tidy things up and hand over a completed set of tasks to the on-coming shift and would go out of her way to see that patients had a cup of tea in the early hours.
The Tories have done nothing except prepare the way for private medicine to dislodge and replace the NHS, and now they tell us that any spare cash will be injected into the service!?! Whilst this is not an outright lie, it is as close to it as you would want to get, and is a worked example of a “false promise” to be added to the litany of lies and false promises that are the stock-in-trade of this hateful gang of Tory robbers, filthy barrow boys! They are enough to make you vomit!
There is a mood developing among working people across the nation, as well as internationally. Even among the milder sections such as doctors, nurses and care workers, the anger is growing. That anger and resentment won’t stop at simply putting the NHS right, now that it is beginning to roll. Like a giant snowball, it will envelop all sections of the working class and eventually trample everything in its path, broaden its sweep, and engulf the whole of capitalist society.
Leading commentary in the more intelligent capitalist press is warning daily of the revolutionary consequences of continued Tory attacks in the light of the awakening of the mighty working class. The Tories will rue the day they started wrecking the NHS and other essential services, and so too will the banks, the monopolies and the greedy rich, as they lose all they now have to the unstoppable power of the working class, on its relentless quest for a socialist society. It won’t stop at Britain’s borders either. The quest for socialism is international, and the same anger and hatred expressed here is being felt right across Europe and the capitalist world.
