Vanessa Feltz has spoken out in support for NHS nurses strikes over Christmas on This Morning.
The 60-year-old shared her views on the nurses’ strikes to Alison Hammond and Dermot O’Leary on Wednesday, as she slammed people who criticise nurses for wanting fair pay and a safe work environment.
Vanessa began: “To blame the nurses for a situation where recruitment and retention is abysmal. They’re 100,000 nurses short, and that is not their fault.
“How are they supposed to shoulder the burden when they don’t have enough colleagues to do the work? When if God forbid they fail people could die as a result.
She added: “I just don’t get how anyone can blame nurses for this, it is not their fault or responsibility that they haven’t got enough colleagues to help do a safe job is it.
In the passionate speech, Vanessa said: "I don’t like the targeting of nurses saying 'how can you desert you patients?'
“They’re saying a) we need to have enough money to live on, some of them are using food banks but b) this isn’t safe and they have started to say – and I believe every word of this – they’re striking as they need to save the NHS.
“Their worried that the NHS that they love and have given their whole lives and career too is crumbling and they need to save the NHS for everyone.”
Fans flooded social media with praise for Vanessa’s support of the nurse’s strikes, as a viewer penned on Twitter : “Well said @VanessaOnAir #Nursestrikes”
As another wrote: “Thank you @vanessafeltz speaking on This morning speaking up for nurses. You are spot on! It isn’t all about personal wealth, it is about building up our NHS for future generations.”
Nurses in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are due to start strike action in a row over pay on Thursday after talks with the Government broke down.
The nursing union was urged to do more to “avoid patient harm” and “alleviate unnecessary distress” for dying patients on strike days by the UK’s four chief nurses and the NHS’s head of cancer care.
Dame Cally Palmer, the national cancer director for NHS England, urged RCN general secretary Pat Cullen to protect “life-saving” and “urgent” cancer operations.
In her letter, obtained by Sky News, she wrote: “Our common aim is to ensure we do not cause harm to people undergoing vital cancer treatment to achieve cure or extension of life.”
In response, the RCN insisted that “cancer patients will get emergency and clinically urgent surgery, it is not in doubt”.
“This is a politically-motivated smear from a Government that is failing cancer patients,” a spokesperson for the union said.
Separately, Dame Ruth May, chief nursing officer for England, and her counterparts in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, also wrote to Ms Cullen raising a series of concerns about patient safety.
They said chemotherapy is being rescheduled from the strike days at some hospitals despite the union agreeing it would be exempt nationally.
The chief nurses also asked for assurances that community nursing services providing “end of life care and good pain and symptom relief” continue in order to “alleviate unnecessary distress” for palliative patients and their families.
The RCN said on Tuesday that it had agreed further exemptions to the strike action, including emergency cancer services and “front-door” urgent care assessment and admission units for paediatric-only A&E departments.
“The safety of patients is everybody’s top concern,” the union’s spokesperson said.
