The chief executive and general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has warned that despite the extraordinary efforts of the profession during the pandemic and beyond, nursing is at risk of being seen as ‘expensive and dispensable’.
Professor Nicola Ranger was reflecting on the impact of Covid-19 on the profession at an RCN event this weekend, which marked five years since the first UK lockdown and the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring a pandemic.
In an address to union members, including many with long-Covid, she discussed the gaps and inequalities that Covid had exposed within the UK’s health systems, as well as the fact that nursing staff had remained ‘undervalued and underappreciated’.
‘Nursing will be seen as dispensable’
Five years on from the pandemic, Professor Ranger said she was ‘really worried’ about the future, and the ‘really big financial strain’ currently facing the health and social care sector.
She explained how ‘the wonderful thing’ about the pandemic was that ‘money wasn’t mentioned at all’.
‘No one talked about your budget. Nobody talked about the cost of a nurse – if you needed it, money was not the issue,’ she said.
‘But we’re going into that phase again, where nursing will be seen as expensive and dispensable.’
Professor Ranger called upon senior nursing staff to speak out for the nursing community to prevent posts from being cut and nursing from being ‘undervalued and misunderstood’.
‘Because actually, we know that without us, the patients just wouldn’t have got the care that they needed,’ she said.
Undervalued and underappreciated
While remembering the ‘extraordinary’ nurses and midwives that Professor Ranger worked with during her role as chief nurse at King’s Hospital during the pandemic, she warned that nursing staff remained ‘undervalued and underappreciated’.
‘Our true brilliance is not understood, and we have to start raising our voices more consistently and more strongly, and believing in our brilliance,’ she told attendees.
Recruitment and retention
Professor Ranger added that major effort was needed to ‘both recruit and retain’ nursing staff, to better prepare for any future pandemic.
‘We need more registered nurses, nursing support workers, and nursing associates. Everybody counts,’ she said.
She stressed the need for improved pay and safer staffing conditions to draw new nurses in and to help preserve the current workforce.
Alongside pay and conditions, Professor Ranger called for more ‘kindness’ among nursing staff – to build a supportive environment between colleagues.
‘It involves treating each other as equals and as a team. But I think there’s something that at the moment we probably also need to think about, is that sometimes, as nurses, it means saying “no”, and we’re not very good at that,’ she added.
Systemic inequalities
The RCN chief said the pandemic had exposed widespread inequalities across nursing, with minority ethnic staff being particularly vulnerable to catching the virus and working on the frontline.
She outlined how staff from ethnic minority groups, like those from Bangladesh and Pakistan, faced ‘significantly’ higher risk of catching Covid than their white colleagues.
Professor Ranger also warned of a ‘significant discrepancy’ in how the pandemic impacted the social care sector, compared to hospital settings.
She added: ‘It was also absolutely devastating that the death rate was much higher in social care, which echoes very, very clearly.
‘And I think the final discrepancy, or inequality, was with the vaccine.’
While the Covid vaccine was optional for NHS staff throughout the pandemic, the vaccine was initially made mandatory for social care staff.
Professor Ranger reflected on the distrust of the vaccine that exists among nurses from minority ethnic backgrounds and called for greater understanding of where these fears come from and what can be done to support nurses with these concerns.
‘We have not really shown that sense of equality with our social care colleagues, and if we’re ever going to get care better, that inequality has to stop.
‘We are one nursing team,’ she said.
The RCN event, attended by Nursing in Practice, included sessions from chief nursing officers (CNOs) and advice for members on accessing benefits payments after leaving work with long Covid and other Covid induced sickness.
In September, the former CNOs from the UK’s four nations shared their experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic.
