This is the moment nurses broke a picket line today to help an injured man. The striking staff raced to assist a male who collapsed just metres from the Bristol Royal Infirmary main entrance this morning.
Nurses left the picket line and went to help the man - providing emergency first aid. The patient was put into the recovery position and was visibly shaking on the ground outside – as temperatures dropped as low as -8 degrees.
Within ten minutes staff working at BRI came out to collect the patient, putting him on a spinal board and lifting him onto a stretcher. The striking nurses returned to the picket line shortly afterwards.
Talking about the strikes Paula Byrne, 58, a Nurse Specialist, said: ''I’ve been a nurse for 40 years next year and I have real concerns, among myself and my colleagues, about the future of nursing. Daily we’re seeing nurses working under great stress with great challenge, and contributing an enormous amount of charity and good will, to maintain patient care so that’s a real concern for me.
''You’re seeing burnouts, you’re seeing thousands of nurse leaving the profession. What we have seen over the last ten years is austerity, austerity measures, public sector pay cuts, rising costs and we find that nurses now their daily living and quality of living has gone downhill.
''The staffing in the NHS is the most valuable asset is has – so if you don’t protect that assess, we’re not going to have a future in healthcare because there won’t be any nurses.
''This isn’t about making things difficult for patients, though we do appreciate that there’s going to be some suffering involved. Unfortunately that’s where we’re at to hopefully bring about some change.''
Councillor Lorraine Francis, 56, is not a nurse but has healthcare role at Avon and Wiltshire Partnership (mental health team). She said: ''I think it’s really important for nurses to be recognised for the hard work they actually do.
''Throughout the pandemic, no one in our team has been off, we’ve just been working as normal – so I think it’s really important to take a couple of hours out this morning to support the picket line. I think we need a government listening and responding to the demands because they’re currently not doing that.
''It’s the first time nurses have come out on strike in their history, which shows how serious we all are about getting better conditions and pay. I think if things continue as they are, strikes will continue, the government will continue to privatise the NHS.
''Nurses will continue to go – why would you want to work for an organisation that’s not listening to you and not recognising the hard work that you do? More and more nurses will leave the service and we’ll have to recruit from abroad, which is happening already.
''Everyone is struggling, but they are the most stoic bunch of practitioners; they will work and they will work and they will work.
''They did that through the pandemic, and they’re doing it now. They work really hard because they genuinely care about their service users and the service that they provide.''
Daniel Tumino, 39, senior nurse in neo natal intensive care, added: ''We’re striking for our safety and the safety of our patients. The pay is getting very low, specially in my unit, we’re losing nurses day to day.
''We used to be made up on 150 nurses looking after 32 beds, but in the last three year’s we’ve had to drop down to 24 beds due to nurses leaving – because we only have 110 nurses now.
''Nurses would rather look at other jobs for more pay or the same pay but with less responsibility. Every more you are making in neo natal intensive care is life dependent for your patients.
''Sometimes we’re working without breaks, sometimes we have to stay to do overtime and we’re not paid for it. You finish at late and you have to be back at 7am on the dot. We do it for our patients, but sometimes you don’t have time to look after yourself and your own family.
''This is the smallest we’ve ever been [in terms of bed spaces], we’re not going to lose more beds but we’re going to cope – we have to cope with the beds we have.
''We’ve cut down to 24 beds and have started refusing patients. There are other NHS trusts all over the south of England want to send patients to us because it’s the only surgical cardiac neo natal unit and we have to refuse them patients because we don’t have space.
''They have to send them to Birmingham, London, Manchester instead. We have babies we have to send all over the country because we don’t have space – but when there aren’t spaces elsewhere, we just have to cope.
''We have nurses looking after three patients, when it should be one-to-one in intensive care – but we’re sometimes looking after three patients. You don’t have time to look after the patient properly, you manage to do their medications and keep their life safe, but you don’t manage to look after other aspects like the mental health of the parents, they are you patients too.
''People are getting stressed and tried, sometimes you think I cannot do this anymore. It’s impacting our will to come to work – why should I come to work when there is no support.
''I would like a pay rise equal to inflation, that’s all. They’ve not been doing that for 12 years. Last year we got a 3% pay rise and they took of 2% for national insurance – so they gave 3% and took 2%, it’s not right.''
