• AS a nurse who has worked for the past 34 years I have to let your readers know the situation we face in the NHS.

I now work in the area of sexual and reproductive health, having trained as a state registered nurse in the early 1980s at University College Hospital in Gower Street. It is a job I love and one I have dedicated my career to.

Once I would have happily contributed to job recruitment fairs, but today I could not, in all honesty, encourage a young person to enter the profession.

Nursing has always been highly stressed work. We deal with people in difficult situations, needing our care.

The NHS is the organisation we believed in and we gave it our all. This was never an ordinary job – it ran on the goodwill of its staff. But today I feel just like a number on a spreadsheet.

Since 2008 we have had a pay freeze. The recent one per cent “increase” for nurses and other health workers was effectively a 14 per cent pay cut.

Most nurses now work 12-hour shifts, and gone are unsocial hours payments, while enhanced pay for working weekends has been eroded to be almost worthless. We are all on our basic pay. Is it any surprise that some nurses are so poor they are being referred to food banks?

For older nurses like myself, the pay freeze has eroded the pensions we will rely on. For younger nurses salaries are so bad that paying into the pension scheme is simply impossible.

The bursary for training has been scrapped. Instead, nurses have to take on full student loans despite having to work on wards for 2,700 hours of their degree course. Half of the training is, and must be, with patients. This is vital to develop the skills required.

So today a nurse will emerge from training with £30,000 of debt or more, and enter one of the lowest paid graduate jobs in the UK.

The NHS is currently short of around 9,500 nurses in London alone. But recruitment and retention is proving harder and harder. Is it any wonder the Royal College of Nursing is contemplating a strike for the first time in its 100-year history?

This is a truly desperate situation. As you think about how to vote, please bear this in mind. This election is vital to the future of the NHS.

DEBBIE HOLLAND
Senior Staff Nurse
NW3