I’m a nurse. While I don’t hate my current job, I no longer feel the burning desire to help people the way I used to.
Don’t get me wrong, I care greatly about my patients and I find real satisfaction in helping others get better. I don’t, however, find any real satisfaction in helping to quite literally save lives and being incredibly undervalued for it. If that makes me a bit of a brat, then so be it.
I became a nurse after solid advice from my mother: “You don’t have to pay fees [this has now changed] and you’re pretty much guaranteed a job for life unless you kill someone.” There is no sarcasm in the use of “solid advice” here – my mother was right – I didn’t pay fees and I got a job before even graduating from university, as a result of my first and only interview. I have worked in an intensive care unit since then.
Intensive care units are remarkable places. Every single day patients and families suffer both the most traumatic and uplifting moments of their lives, and we are there beside them. I have spent Christmases away from my own family, holding the hands of someone who had just lost a loved one. I have spent Saturday nights covered in bodily fluids and preforming CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) on people I was speaking to moments before. I have done all this with an army of other nurses by my side, plodding along with very little argument, because that’s what nurses do, among about a thousand other things that people just don’t see.
However, having trained for three years and undertaken additional training in my own time and at times my own expense, that same job I got straight out of university could well be the job I have until I retire.
You see, while there are opportunities for development within the NHS, they are few and far between and often come with a large jump in responsibility without a matching increase in pay. I started on a salary of about £22,000 a year – a reasonable graduate salary. As a Band 5 – my current position, a position in which many nurses stay for their whole career, my salary will never surpass £28,500. For comparison, a friend of mine working in marketing is earning in excess of £35,000 a year, working nine to five, Monday to Friday, without the very real burden of other people’s lives resting on their shoulders.
In short, the NHS is, for a multitude of reasons, unable to pay and treat its staff the way it should. Despite what you might end up believing if you listened to Jeremy Hunt and Theresa May, nurses and doctors (and all other healthcare professionals) work exceptionally hard, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to care for you and your loved ones – and they aren’t rewarded in the way they deserve.
I am aware that what I have written might make me seem ungrateful for my secure (for the moment) job. I am ready for responses along the lines of “nurses aren’t nurses for the money”, and “you knew all this before becoming a nurse”. While this is true – I never became a nurse with the expectation of becoming a millionaire or owning a Maserati – I do, however, hope to some day be able to become a homeowner and, aside from any material gains, I would like to feel valued for the work I do. I am beginning to feel, along with more of my colleagues than I can count, that a career in nursing is unlikely to ever provide me with these opportunities. It’s all very well and good helping to improve the lives of others, but, perhaps selfishly, I would like to be able to do this without such a great cost to my personal wellbeing.
I am immensely proud of working for the NHS. The very fact that any person in the UK can walk into a GP’s surgery or hospital and be treated and cared for without paying a single penny is something we should all be tremendously grateful for. The NHS is grossly underfunded and yet remains free at the point of care, for everyone. It employs some of the most gifted and caring people in the world.
Having been a part of that amazing system I know that, in one sense, I will always be a nurse. For the time being, I am still employed as one. I just don’t know how much longer I can last.