Are You OK? campaign

Four in ten nurses currently describe their mental health and wellbeing as either “bad” or “very bad”. This is the shocking finding of the latest Nursing Times survey on occupational health, which has been carried out in support of our Are You OK? campaign. To put things in perspective, six…

Compassionate care is integral to nursing and a core value of the NHS, Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) and Care Quality Commission. Nurses have a duty to be kind and compassionate, to put the needs and interests of others before their own. Yet for many, it is more than just…

As a trained psychiatric and community nurse with 30 years of experience in the NHS, I’ve never known nurses to be more burnt out than they are currently. Many are reacting by quitting their jobs in unprecedented numbers. More than 27,000 NHS workers voluntarily resigned from the NHS from July…

Over the years there have been times when I have been unable to work because of mental ill health. Looking back, these times have been so different to the times I have been absent because of the flu or after surgery, where there was a clear beginning, middle and end…

There has been a lot of media coverage and campaigns to make us more aware of our own mental health and that of others. But is that reflected in society and in our profession or is it lip service? Controversial I know, but now more than ever, the emotional and…

For decades and until relatively recently, musculoskeletal disorders have been the principal cause of nurses’ sickness absence in the UK. I trained as a nurse in the era that first recognised the damage being done to nurses’ health and wellbeing by back injuries. From our very first day as student…

The number of Covid-19 admissions is still falling and over half the adult population has now had at least one vaccine dose. As a result, media talk has turned to issues like pub openings, Covid ‘passports’ and other distractions. Pressure on NHS staff may be reducing but a focus on…

Nothing could have exemplified 2020 as the Year of the Nurse and Midwife better than our profession’s response to the worldwide coronavirus pandemic. In some ways, the health and care system entered the pandemic with one hand tied behind its back: across the UK, there were around 50,000 nursing vacancies…

The mental health and wellbeing of nursing staff during the coronavirus pandemic has been an area that Nursing Times has tried to shine a light on from the start. In my book, it’s one of those subjects that is always in danger of being pushed under the carpet and ignored,…

Nursing is about delivering holistic care to patients, their families and communities, care that meets their physical, social and psychological needs. But nursing also takes its toll on nurses in terms of their own physical, social and psychological needs, a fact that the pandemic has demonstrated so starkly. Physically, nurses…