3 days ago
Nurses deserve more credit
When I was recently in hospital for almost six months, one of my closest and most impish friends – who knows me very well and figured that I wouldn't be up for anything serious – would bring me the novels of Betty Neels. Neels is largely forgotten now, but between 1969 and her death in 2001 she wrote 134 novels for the publisher Mills & Boon. Her male protagonists are often Dutch surgeons (her own husband was a Dutch sailor) and the plots are a bit samey: spirited nurse hates arrogant doctor/surgeon/consultant but eventually falls A over T in love with him.
At the same time as I was reading Neels's novels, I was watching with my devious little hack's eye the interaction between the doctors and nurses around me, and it couldn't have been more different. Nurses spoke to nurses, and doctors to doctors; 'The only time the doctors speak to us is when they want us to do something they don't want to do,' laughed one beautiful young nurse. I thought of this when reading about the new threatened doctors strike and how analysis from the Royal College of Nursing shows that 'nurses pay has been so severely eroded that starting salaries are now over £8,000 lower than if wages had kept up with inflation since 2010.'
Is it a class thing? Nurses are more likely to have gone to state schools, while doctors are more likely to be from the middle class. Doctors staged about a dozen strikes in 2023 and 2024 under the Tories, were immediately given a 22 per cent pay rise by Labour and still feel like they're entitled to more. On a recent episode of Jeremy Vine on Channel 5, an older, working-class female community care worker in Manchester, Sarah, rang in to oppose the doctors' new demand. She took on a posh, young female doctor ('Helena Pugh' – you couldn't make it up) and matched her claim for claim about how hard she worked. All for a damn sight less money and prestige.
One nurse at my hospital ward told me: 'I've done this job since I was young, and I'm just about to retire. In my experience, the hierarchy is still pretty much there and the consultants are still unapproachable.' (Mistrust of 'weird' consultants was very evident among the nurses I met.) 'Nursing is an ill-defined profession,' she continued. 'We're like a sponge sitting in the middle of the team, soaking up all the bits that no one else will do, from admin to cleaning.'
A nurse at the Royal Sussex told me: 'Nurses make terrible strikers because we're out there on the picket line, then our alarm goes off and we run back onto the wards because we're needed. They know they've got us…'
A thread on Reddit by a nurse summed it up for me: 'I'm not resentful of junior doctors striking. I am bitter how bad we do in comparison to their success though. If every nurse just walked out, can you imagine the chaos that would ensue? Patients would come to harm; there would be chaos on the wards, in ICU, in A&E. At the end of the day, nurses do the majority of the labour and graft. But look at the nurses strike in America; the majority walked out and the strikes lasted three days. They got what they wanted. I think if we stayed strong, we would be in a much stronger position.'
To return to the class issue, maybe the difference is that nursing is a calling – like being a nun, if 'the NHS is the closest thing the English people have to a religion' as Nigel Lawson quipped – while being a doctor is something clever bourgeois girls and boys become if they were good at science subjects at school.
Whatever, the mismatch is unfortunate, and having reverberations far beyond who will and won't strike. People may be losing their religion; earlier this month the new boss of the NHS, Sir Jim Mackey, said: 'It feels like we've built mechanisms to keep the public away because it's an inconvenience.' Though she was a comedy character in Carry Onfilms, it's telling and slightly surreal how many people with recent experience of the NHS as patients yearn for a Hattie Jacques-type 'matron' to sort it all out.
There is also a consensus that after graduating, doctors should be made to work for at least five years minimum in the NHS before decamping to distant shores – the same places that the nurses are now being tempted to by adverts on television. In the sunlit wards of Australia, away from the responsibility that comes with being the carriers of a religious flame, maybe at last the romantic alliances between nurses and doctors dreamed of by Betty Neels can finally come to fruition. Until then, it's ironic to think that even the snogging game my generation played as children – 'doctors and nurses' – assumed that this was the natural order of things. If the game was played realistically these days, the two chosen children would simply go into separate rooms, and fume about how easy the other one has it.
