With nurses planning their first ever national strike next week, Ruth Hallows speaks to Carol Webley-Brown, a senior figure in the Royal College of Nursing, a highly experienced nurse in local hospitals and GP practices and a Lewisham councillor.

NHS nurses are working in a ‘broken system’, facing overwhelming emotional and physical exhaustion while trying to do their best for patients, according to the Royal College of Nursing’s honorary treasurer, Carol Webley-Brown.

Webley-Brown, whose career spans four decades in A&E and mental health services is also a Labour member of Lewisham Council and a practice nurse in addition to her RCN role, giving her a remarkable overview of the current crisis in the NHS from both local and national perspectives. In her long career Webley-Brown has seen it all, but not like this.

The demands on the NHS in the post-covid era, with ever extending waiting lists and ambulances queueing up outside casualty units are part of the background that has led RCN members to call their first national strike, due to take place on December 15 and 20, over staff shortages and pay levels.

Speaking exclusively to Eastlondonlines, Webley-Brown, who lives in Crofton Park, the ward she represents on the council, said the NHS is “haemorrhaging” nurses. Currently there are 47,000 nurse vacancies and the number of active nurses has decreased since the start of the year. Between March 2022 and April 2022 alone, the number of nurses and health visitors dropped by a staggering 2,128.

In the 2021 NHS satisfaction survey, all hospitals in Croydon, Hackney, Tower Hamlets, and Lewisham rated poorly with regards to burnout with less than five out of ten. It’s something that Webley-Brown, who has worked in both Lewisham and Croydon, is all too familiar with. “We’re under so much stress. We’re going to bed tired and waking up tired. When we go to bed, our feet are still doing the walking, your brain is thinking “I didn’t do this” or “I didn’t do that”. After a time, it just gets too much. You’re crying and you’re not really knowing why.”

The shortage is causing existing nurses to pick up the slack leading to burnout. She said that ‘killer’ 12-hour shifts that should only happen three times a week are increasing to four or five due to staff shortages or illness and those 12-hours rarely stay within their time limits. ”You don’t wait for your shift to start. You get there early because your colleagues need to get off on time… Usually you have to stay longer to do everything… because you’re a professional and that pressure is exhausting.”

“You can’t remember if you’ve even had a cup of tea in the morning. We bring water bottles, but we don’t drink them. We bring a sandwich, and it goes uneaten. We’re just far too busy and that’s what burns us out,” she added. 

At the heart of nursing is a deep sense of “responsibility to their patients”, but as the NHS struggles Webley-Brown said it can be hard for nurses to fight off that feeling of helplessness. “For me, the burnout is listening to your patients and thinking I can’t take any more,” Webley-Brown said. “I don’t want to hear any more of this because there’s nothing I can do to fix it. The referral time isn’t going to be in the time it should be so there’s no point in doing the referral because it’s giving hope. Not just hope for myself but hope for the patient.”

Describing a young girl experiencing her first psychotic episode, Webley-Brown struggles to fight back the tears. “You have a mum and a dad desperately saying it’s their only child. You try to help but you know in your heart that [the admission’s] just not going to happen because you’ve got no beds.” 

“When you do finally get a bed, it’s 200 miles away in Weston-super-Mare,” she said. “But you’re in Croydon and mum and dad don’t drive. This is their only child with her first time of psychosis. We (the nurses) just held mum. I cried, she cried.”

Navigating the allocation of beds weighs heavily on Webley-Brown. “Discharging a patient who’s not ready to be discharged, just because you haven’t got a bed,” she said. “That can’t be right. How can you sit morally and ethically with that dilemma? It makes you toss and turn at night. It wears you out!”

A diabetic, Webley-Brown has even had to forgo hospital appointments due to lack of leave and overtime “rarely paid for” or recognised. “I was owed about three days [off, due to overtime]. I asked for this so I could go to my hospital appointments but was told by my practice manager that ‘I should manage my time better’.”

Out of a “responsibility” to her patients, Webley-Brown felt unable to call in sick. “I didn’t go for a check up for a year and a half and I’m telling my patients to look after themselves!” she added. 

As the first strike in RCN’s 106-year history draws ever closer, Webley-Brown hopes that nurses will be “valued” and “recognised for the professional work they do and the professional that they are”.  

“We need to take everything back in house and really make the NHS be more effective, which it was until it was broken down to bits.”