Putting cost over care! Nurses and their working lives are at the heart of the funding and morale crisis in the NHS, and the political clash over the public sector pay cap and dwindling staff levels.
Christina Sosseh has been a nurse since 1986 and explains to Felix Magazine the reality of her life as a nurse.
“I have been in nursing for over 30 years. I work in the community in Milton Keynes, I work with adults who have learning disabilities.”
“I started at a long-stay hospital where I did my training. That was the Bromham Hospital in Bedford. Once I qualified I worked for a year as a staff nurse and then moved to Milton Keynes to work for what was then Buckingham County Council in a day centre for adults with disabilities. After that I worked in a small residential unit for adults again in Bedford.
“I moved back to Milton Keynes to work for the Health Community Service at an assessment and treatment centre for young adults with challenging behaviour. From there I moved to become a manager at a unit for respiratory care. So I have worked in a range of treatment centres but always with people with learning disabilities.
“Before I started, my dreams and aspirations as a nurse was I would be able to support people and give them a better quality of life. And that, to an extent, has been what I have achieved. But only to an extent because these days it has become more difficult. With everything these days the focus is all on money and time.
“As a nurse we were never taught about finances or business because we were employed by the health service. And in that health service the job was about assessing people and what their needs were. And then you put services in to meet those needs. There was never an issue before about how much time a nurse would spend with patients, or how much their treatment cost.
“Whereas these days when a patient is assessed and they need care and support, you have to look at how much that costs, who the best people are to perform those skills and that can be quite demoralising at times. There are lots of services that nurses perform within the NHS where they have to compromise in one way or another to perform the duties they are asked, by cutting the amount of time they spend with a patient or to carry out the necessary work. The nurses themselves have to cut back on things like having lunch breaks or a cup of tea to relax.
Unpaid Overtime
“It means that nurses are working a lot of overtime and are basically unpaid for it. It happens a lot and is now accepted as being part of nursing. Over the past 10 years we have never had a substantial pay increase and I look at my pay-slip and I am actually taking home less than I was 10 years ago.
“The wage constraints impact morale, because the view we are getting is we are not valued, that if they need more nurses they can get them. We know that is not true because over all the country there are 40,000 nursing vacancies, but the nurses in post are constantly getting their wages eroded.
“Conditions are worsening year by year by year. If I was starting out all over again there is no way I would go into nursing, as the pay and conditions are now. Nursing is a very skilled job, it takes a lot of training. Nurses are in a situation where they have to work second jobs, they don’t have enough money to make ends meet. I know a lot of nurses are having to borrow money from family, friends, pay-day loans That has an impact on the nurses’ self esteem.
“I am a single parent, with a 21-year-old daughter I am trying to support through university. I know I would never recommend she goes into nursing.”
by Bob Graham
The post NHS: A Nurse’s Story – Cost over Care appeared first on Felix Magazine.
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