Portsmouth nurses strike: Queen Alexandra Hospital sees picket line for the second time this year

The picket line outside Queen Alexandra Hospital was once again lined with exhausted and disappointed nurses who are fighting a battle with the government to improve working conditions by increasing their staff as well as a rise in their salaries.

The ongoing dispute between the NHS workers and the government is over pay, which many nurses say is at the root of their levels of staff decreasing dramatically – which in turn, they say, has a detrimental impact on the medical care that patients receive.

The government has offered the NHS a £1,400 increase for front-line workers, but the Royal College of Nursing Union has come back and said that there needs to be more improvements made, and the pay adjusted.

Evelyn Jimenez has been a qualified nurse for five years, but because she got her nursing degree abroad, she is not considered as a nurse, rather a nursing associate, which also means that she is in band four and earns less than her nurse colleagues.

In order to be promoted to band five, Evelyn has to complete an English test, which she said that some of her peers who were born in England have struggled to pass.

She stood with her best friend and colleague, Laura Mckay, in a bid to help their patients who are sometimes placed in compromising situations due to under staffing.

Evelyn said: ‘It is all of the understaffing situations I am involved in. I get to the point at the end of my shift where I just want to cry.

‘There is nothing anyone can do. It gets to the point where we just feel so disappointed and there is nothing more we can physically do.

‘I could spend all day telling you about some of the unsafe conditions. Being a nurse shouldn’t be this hard, trying to save lives shouldn’t be this hard. We wake up every day thinking how the day is going to be, scared because you don’t know what’s going to happen.’

Laura, who is a newly qualified nurse and has been in the industry for just over a year, works in the emergency department. She was trained during the pandemic, which has left its mark on many nurses.

She said: ‘I trained during Covid which was really really difficult and the expectations of students during Covid was not what you would expect of a student so I came out with a lot of trauma because of things you don’t usually see, but these last few months have been tougher than anything and I have another 40 years to go. I’m going to do it but I just don’t know how.’

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The friends said that without each other’s support and guidance within their career, they would struggle even more due to the unsafe conditions, the lack of pay for the job they do and the fact that Evelyn is not recognised as a nurse.

Evelyn added: ‘The test I have to do isn’t cheap either, it’s about £400 just to be able to get to band five. I am actually qualified in my country as a nurse because I got my nursing degree but because I haven’t done my English test, I’m not here.

‘Why are you asking me to do the same job when I am a qualified nurse but you can’t pay me so. It is something that I will never be able to understand.

Laura added: ‘You start to lose yourself and if I didn’t have my family and friends I wouldn’t know what I would do. I think every nurse has each other to keep them going because no-one else fully understands.

‘You don’t realise how much the public support you and hearing them is quite emotional.’

Many of the nurses that were outside the hospital have been financial struggling to the point where they have been forced to attend food banks.

Jamie Barnes, 48, has been a student nurse for over 20 years and he said: ‘I just want to be treated fairly. I know nurses and more senior staff having to go to food banks and that is embarrassing that shouldn’t be happening.’

He said that nurses and doctors who save people’s lives daily are struggling so much that they are finding it difficult to feed themselves.

He added: ‘I have seen some people work through the pandemic - close colleagues- and it has changed them. We have a duty of care inside and out of the organisation. There aren’t many organisations that have that responsibility for the public.

‘If we needed to go in now we would. If something happened in the hospital now I think every one here would drop everything and go in to help. If there was an accident on the road here, we would help, we have that duty of care.

‘I don’t want to particularly be out here but everyone needs to look after themselves now.’

Shelley Pearce has been in the industry for years and she said that the pay rises will help make the industry more attractive to students as well as keeping the existing staff to help train them.

She said: ‘We have been losing staff and that is just getting worse, we need the experienced staff to teach the newly qualified staff.

‘I think we have got to keep going. I think it is the only thing we can do make a difference.’