Get Your Coat

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Dear Mr Johnson,

I know you’ll ignore this letter just as you did my last two. However, I thought I may as well give it another bash. This time I will offer no statistics since you pay no heed to them it seems. I simply want to say that you have let us down. You have let nurses and every other worker in the NHS down with the refusal to respect us and the work we do. We tirelessly turn up for yet another day in the line of fire. Morale is the lowest I have seen in my 20 years of nursing. In one of my workplaces, we have lost 50% of the reception staff in the last three months because they simply couldn’t take any more. (OK so that’s one statistic).

I know all you care about is money and perhaps your plan is to push as many NHS workers out as you can to enable the privatisation of the NHS to appear to be an excellent idea. But this has meant that during a time when the NHS has been needed most, it has been on it’s knees. If you had listened to us and shown us respect for the work we do – aside from the fickle and fleeting rounds of applause – I'm sure there would be many more workers to support patients requiring hospitalisation. Fair conditions and pay is all we ask for. I have written and spoken about this so many times I don’t have the energy to go into it again. It’s all in my books, the first of which I sent you.

And you have let the British public down. Your dithering and indecisive approach has let Covid rage like wildfire through our country and we, and especially our children, are suffering. I have seen devastating effects in my work as a school nurse through this pandemic and anxiously wait to see what the lasting repercussions will be for our teens, particularly as I am raising two of them.

Yes our vaccination schedule is a trailblazer but that is only through the altruism of your NHS and volunteers, not through the knowledge of politicians. It was only last year that Matt Hancock was announcing that nurses would be helping in the flu campaign of 2020 - something we’ve run for decades!

Boris, the time has come for you to do the decent thing and get your coat.

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