Nurses Strike

[TartanGirl1]

Do you agree with the nurses strike?

Absolutely yes 100%
I’m an ex nurse ( didn’t bother renewing my registration after 3 years living abroad) but now work as a HCA.
The wards are fucking awful for staff and patients currently - I went back into a ward earlier this year. Staffing levels both RGN and HCA are way below safe levels. It can’t continue.
I stayed 4 months and on the day I resigned so did 3 others!
Nursing is no longer a vocation, it’s a professional career with registration fees, degrees, masters and specialist qualifications - if we want good quality care for our patients then they need to massively improve working conditions and pay to even start to address the huge retention issues in the nhs.

Yes. I'm really scared of it in case it impacts me or my family but the NHS needs saving and whatever we are doing so far isn't working

They deserve much much more than we as a country give them.

Retired nurse here and I'm old enough to remember being on strike in 1n the 70s and 80s (different union.)
"Since August 2010, the earnings of an average nurse have increased by about 20% in cash terms. Over the same period, prices increased by 32%, average private sector pay by 41%, and average public sector pay by 28%.

Average real-terms nurse earnings fell by 9.4% in that time."

Ben Zaranko from the Institute Of Fiscal Studies

Yes

Yes. I 100% support it.
I’ve been a nurse for 35 years and left the NHS 6 weeks ago. I’m now working in the private sector.
Most of my ex-colleagues have voted to strike because of the working conditions and rapidly reducing quality of patient care.
My new job still has a number of stresses but at least I’m getting paid much better.

Exactly this!

Isn’t the problem that nurses get trained up and then go and work for the better paid private sector. No way can a public service compete with private sector wages so it will have to be something other than money that retains staff.

My Dad currently has oesophageal cancer and is on chemotherapy. He’s also in Bupa and could go privately but there’s no private option for cancer around here, so stuck with NHS.
I support better pay and conditions for healthcare but if his care is affected in any way I won’t. Can someone reassure me that chemotherapy/ cancer operations/
ICU and recovery for cancer won’t be affected?

What jobs did they go on to do? Did they get nicer jobs, which also paid more?

The average band 5 nurse, of which most nurses are, do not earn anywhere near £35k a year!

Yes.

If we don't value nurses and midwives they will leave, as many of them already are because they can earn more either in the private sector or administering Botox and fillers.

Many of the "efficiencies" the government has been encouraging the NHS to make over the past 12 years has been cutting or removing funding entirely from charities and organisations providing additional support on the wards and in the communities. The work that these charity employees would have done has been foisted on the already overworked nursing teams.

I lost my job as a hospital and community breastfeeding supporter 5 years ago. The CCG said the suites of me and my team of 12 could be easily covered by midwives and health visitors. The same is happening with all kinds of other services on other wards and departments.

We can't keep expecting people to do more.

@Kabbalah - there are currently 47,000 nurse vacancies across the country, 100s of nurses leaving every month and 8,000 less nursing students this year than the year before.

Unless we make nursing a profession that people want to go into it will remain chronically understaffed. That's what puts the patients at risk. Not the strike.

A pay rise won’t cure it all, but it will make the remaining nurses feel valued and less likely to leave the profession and will encourage new people to start the training.

This:

@lightisnotwhite you don't think £20k a year is a low wage? You know it equates to about £8 an hour after taxes etc? Anyway nurses aren't paid £20k a year, that is the very bottom of band 2. HCA's, Support staff, admin, phlebotomists, domestics, catering, porters etc are mostly band 2-3's. A band 5 (level 5 as you call it) is where most nurses start and stay. They take home about £28-29k a year on average (after tax etc). For a hell of a lot more work than the general public realise. They very rarely work only three 12 hour shifts a week. They very rarely are able to take a break during their shift. There are, roughly, about zero Band 9 opportunities in nursing that would get £95k a year. I say zero because they don't come up very often. Band 9 nursing roles are very upper management level, like trust management, which I'm sure you will realise, are very very few and far between.

Oddly enough all the nurses I know all claim to be overworked and underpaid. However:

One drives a brand new convertible Audi. Their social media posts are mainly trips out to restaurants, cruises, fancy foreign holidays, weekends away in fancy hotels, new motorbike.

Another collects Mulberry handbags and goes off to work in places like the Philippines for months on end (some charity work arranged by her church which is very admirable but leaves her less experienced colleagues covering her job in the meantime).

The others all have nice new Mercedes, get their houses fully decorated every couple of years plus they've all been on multiple cruises/holidays this year.

Absolutely no one else I know in any other job has a lifestyle like that.

Don't envy them one bit, they all work hard but they're hardly underpaid. And I very much doubt a bigger pay packet would make them any more enthusiastic.

Im an 8a - after tax, NI, pension contributions etc I only take home £32,000 a year. So our band 5 colleagues must be taking home a lot less than you say unless they are doing only weekends and antisocial hours.

I support the nurses strike. Nurses have been reluctant to strike for such a long time, despite worsening terms and conditions. And the government has completely used this fact against them.

As far as I'm concerned, nurses are one of the worst treated professions. They have had a really shitty 2 years on top of a shitty 10 years of cuts to the NHS. I completely support them to take industrial action to stop the government walking all over them. D

Yes. I think it’s bad anyone has to strike to get a fair pay.

I know one very well paid nurse, she’s a Macmillan nurse (may be higher than a nurse?) YEARS of experience. Horrid hours.

Another nurse I know gets around £26K so not much at all, again shifts. Gets more if she does bank hours.

I earn more than either of them for a 9-5 office job, sat on my ass in meetings all day.

@Kabbalah people are dying now because of staff shortages. On average it takes an ambulance over one hour to get to a stroke or heart attack victim. Jess Phillips tweeted today that she'd been with her father who was ill, for 14 hours in A@E. She said the staff were lovely and doing their best but ...

it's a very strong yes from me. I told the lovely nurse I saw at my surgery today that she had my, and my families support if she chose to go on strike. And I'll tell the one I'm due to see next week the same.

No- My DH is a nurse, an excellent one at that, he is know hospital wise for having a midas touch and inserting and removing lines and drains and he gives resus his all. I fully support the pay rise but he has said he cannot strike, because he's terrified of not being there when doctors are struggling to get lines in, or that the agency staff will not be as fast in noticing a decline in his beloved patients.
Both my sisters are also nurses and are still on the fence

Yes I do.

Yes and no. I think they should be paid more and the working conditions should be sorted out but what the RCN is asking for pay is out of touch at the moment and I don’t support a 17% pay rise at this time. 8-10% yes.

I can’t comment much on Health care assistants as I have no idea what training they need to do to qualify. If they need degrees like nurses then surely they should be paid higher too in line with graduates.

A general staff nurse (i.e. the nurse most people would think of) is a band 5. Starting salary of £27k increases to almost £33k at the top of their banding after 4 years experience. Yes most nurses will earn more than this with unsociable hours pay but this is to reflect the impact that working unsociable hours has on your life (just Google what working regular nights shifts does to your health and life expectancy).

Nursing is a tough career choice and working standards on the wards are critical, mainly due to poor staffing. You might think a salary of £30ish K is reasonable but given the choice between a regular 9/5 job or nursing (degree required, shifts, nights, missing Christmas and weekends, extreme stress, no breaks, last minute off duty, increasing job description, awful management) which would you choose? An increase in salary would make the job more desirable. An increase in staffing and retention would in turn help improve the care and safety on the wards.

No one thinks 17% is remotely possible. It’s the start of negotiations. It will be haggled down.