Flavia Munn

Presenteeism is a product of the staffing crisis engulfing the health service. It’s unfair and unsustainable. and requires political to eradicate

Under pressure to keep turning up

With picket lines of nurses likely to be springing up outside NHS workplaces soon, it’s important to remember not every nurse wants – or is able – to take part

Doctors learn early on stay on the right side of nursing staff. Ministers would do well to follow suit and heed the profession’s pleas on pay and safe staffing

The trust placed in nurses will be central to new process designed to enable patients and families to seek a second opinion

In the build-up to the UK’s next general election, daily safety breaches in the NHS need to be taken seriously, not waved away with empty pledges

Nursing staff in England, Wales and Northern Ireland need only look to their Agenda for Change colleagues in Scotland to be left wondering why they continue to be short-changed in annual pay awards. The 3.6% award for staff on Agenda for Change contracts in every part of the UK except Scotland, as recommended to by the NHS pay review body, was called grotesque by the RCN. The college pointed to the higher award afforded to medical colleagues. And the experience of nursing staff in Scotland’s NHS, who have already accepted a higher pay rise, negotiated without input from any pay review body, is evidence the current system needs a shake-up. England health and social care secretary Wes Streeting should look to how NHS pay is set in Scotland if he wants to see a system that works in nurses’ best interests.

An NHS trust plans to cut senior nurse leader posts in a bid to reduce its costs is a short-termist approach to budget control that could have dangerous consequences, says the editor of Nursing Standard. Nurses in band 8 posts are not mere pen-pushers, but senior clinicians with responsibility for patient safety and historic examples of cuts to senior nursing posts show such decisions can be catastrophic.