Nurse Jenny, who cared for Boris Johnson in ICU, resigns over lack of respect and pay for health workers
An intensive care nurse who stood at the side of Prime Minister Boris Johnson when he was hospitalized with covid-19 has resigned, citing lack of government support for health-care workers.
Jenny McGee, who has worked as an intensive care nurse in Britain for 11 years, said: “We’re not getting the respect and now pay that we deserve. I’m just sick of it. So I’ve handed in my resignation.”
Johnson, one of the first world leaders diagnosed with covid-19, spent three days in a London intensive care unit in April 2020. After he recovered, he focused praise on two nurses who stayed at his bedside for 48 hours, “when things could have gone either way.” They were Luis Pitarma, from Portugal, and McGee, from New Zealand.
“The reason, in the end, my body did start to get enough oxygen was because for every second of the night they were watching, and they were thinking, and they were caring and making the interventions I needed,” Johnson said.
He extended his thanks to the country’s National Health Service, saying Britain would beat the pandemic “because our NHS is the beating heart of this country.”
But many health-care workers say Johnson’s government has failed to demonstrate that appreciation with concrete support for the NHS.
In a new documentary for Channel 4, “The Year Britain Stopped,” McGee described the scene at St. Thomas’ Hospital when the prime minister arrived. “All around him there was lots and lots of sick patients, some of whom were dying. I remember seeing him and thinking he looked very, very unwell. He was a different color, really.”
McGee also told the program that she declined to take part in a final “clap for carers” photo opportunity at Downing Street.
“I wanted to stay out of it. Lots of nurses felt that the government hadn’t led very effectively — the indecisiveness, so many mixed messages,” she said.
Nurses, their unions and much of the British public — who in the first wave of the pandemic spent weeks clapping and banging pots for health-care workers — are upset by what they say is an insulting offer by Johnson’s government for a 1 percent pay raise.
The government has said nurses are getting a “modest” pay increase in a difficult financial environment. An opinion poll for the Observer newspaper found 72 percent of the public said nurses should be given more.
In Britain, the average yearly pay for nurses is £33,788, or nearly $48,000, according to NHS Digital. By contrast in the United States, the median annual wage of registered nurses is $75,330, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
A recent survey by YouGov and the IPPR think tank found about a quarter of NHS workers — or 100,000 nurses in England said they are “more likely” to leave the sector than a year ago due to concerns over pay, understaffing and exhaustion from the pandemic.
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