The NHS has been operating on good will for the last five years

[Northerner]

With the NHS running just to keep still, it’s the human infrastructure; nurses, doctors, midwives and paramedics who feel the pressures most.

Nurses, paramedics and doctors work flat-out to support, run and maintain our NHS. They heroically deal with anyone and everyone, from our elderly who need care, to victims of accident and attacks, from mental health issues to child birth – all are seen, all are treated and all are cared for.

Often nurses will go a 12-hour shift without a break only to stay an extra half an hour, because the shift handover on a busy ward takes time to do properly.

This ‘good will’ keeps the NHS running and is why the Royal College of Nursing have launched their “What If” campaign to highlight the regularly unrecognised and unrewarded excess hours and extra work that nurses and other health care professionals do.

http://leftfootforward.org/2015/02/...s-time-for-the-government-to-ease-the-strain/

 

[grovesy]

I reckon it is longer than 5 years!

 

[Copepod]

Only the last 5 years?!?

I was working unpaid hours and missing meal breaks from when I started working in NHS in 1985! And I loved it. It's frustrating not to give proper care, although exhausting to stay late on more shifts than not, which didn't happen to me back then.

 

[Northerner]

Well, it's nearly 7 years since I was diagnosed, and whilst in hospital I was cared for by some of the hardest working people I've ever encountered. I think that, with the cuts and changes that have been implemented over the past five years have made what has always been a difficult job very much harder.