{"id":279264,"date":"2025-07-21T06:25:13","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T06:25:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/279264\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T06:25:13","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T06:25:13","slug":"nurses-deserve-more-credit-the-spectator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/279264\/","title":{"rendered":"Nurses deserve more credit | The Spectator"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was recently in hospital for almost six months, one of my closest and most impish friends \u2013 who knows me very well and figured that I wouldn\u2019t be up for anything serious \u2013 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\u00a0bit\u00a0<\/strong>samey: spirited nurse hates arrogant doctor\/surgeon\/consultant but eventually falls A over T in love with him.<\/p>\n

At the same time as I was reading Neels\u2019s novels, I was watching with my devious little hack\u2019s eye the interaction between the doctors and nurses around me, and it couldn\u2019t have been more different. Nurses spoke to nurses, and doctors to doctors; \u2018The only time the doctors speak to us is when they want us to do something they don\u2019t want to do,\u2019 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 \u2018nurses pay has been so severely eroded that starting salaries are now over \u00a38,000 lower than if wages had kept up with inflation since 2010.\u2019<\/p>\n

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\u2019re entitled to more. On a recent episode of\u00a0Jeremy Vine\u00a0on Channel 5, an older, working-class female community care worker in Manchester, Sarah, rang in to oppose the doctors\u2019 new demand. She took on a posh, young female doctor (\u2018Helena Pugh\u2019 \u2013 you couldn\u2019t make it up) and matched her claim for claim about how hard she worked. All for a damn sight less money and prestige.<\/p>\n

One nurse at my hospital ward told me: \u2018I\u2019ve done this job since I was young, and I\u2019m just about to retire. In my experience, the hierarchy is still pretty much there and the consultants are still unapproachable.\u2019 (Mistrust of \u2018weird\u2019 consultants was very evident among the nurses I met.) \u2018Nursing is an ill-defined profession,\u2019 she continued. \u2018We\u2019re 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.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n

A nurse at the Royal Sussex told me: \u2018Nurses make terrible strikers because we\u2019re out there on the picket line, then our alarm goes off and we run back onto the wards because we\u2019re needed. They know they\u2019ve got us\u2026\u2019<\/p>\n

\n

Maybe the difference is that nursing is a calling \u2013 like being a nun<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A thread on Reddit by a nurse summed it up for me: \u2018I\u2019m 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\u00a0<\/strong>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.\u2019<\/p>\n

To return to the class issue, maybe the difference is that nursing is a calling \u2013 like being a nun, if \u2018the NHS is the closest thing the English people have to a religion\u2019 as Nigel Lawson quipped \u2013 while being a doctor is something clever bourgeois girls and boys become if they were good at science subjects at school.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Whatever, the mismatch is unfortunate, and having reverberations far beyond who will and won\u2019t strike. People may be losing their religion; earlier this month the new boss of the NHS, Sir Jim Mackey, said: \u2018It feels like we\u2019ve built mechanisms to keep the public away because it\u2019s an inconvenience.\u2019\u00a0Though she was a comedy character in\u00a0Carry\u00a0Onfilms, it\u2019s telling and slightly surreal how many people with recent experience of the NHS as patients yearn for\u00a0a\u00a0Hattie Jacques-type \u2018matron\u2019 to sort it all out.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 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\u2019s ironic to think that even the snogging game my generation played as children \u2013 \u2018doctors and nurses\u2019 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When I was recently in hospital for almost six months, one of my closest and most impish friends…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":279265,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4316],"tags":[105,4348,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-279264","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-healthcare","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114889800236584962","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279264\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}