NURSING union leader Pat Cullen has vowed to continue to fight for safe staffing levels and fair pay in her New Year’s message, published today.

The general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) urged members to push ministers further than they want to go to secure better conditions in 2024. 

RCN nurses were forced to take to the pickets in a national strike for the first time in its history last year. But Ms Cullen said that politicians only did enough “to save their own skins” in negotiations. 

She said that politicians granted “modest progress” and “not the revolution that nursing needs and patients deserve.”

After industrial action this year, the union won a 5 per cent pay award, which it described as “increasingly inadequate.”

“We were on picket lines across the country either side of last Christmas and we’d never been louder as a profession,” Ms Cullen said. Nurses were “pushed there because nobody was listening but very firmly believing something positive would come out of it all.

“Would we do it over again? Yes, by your actions you forced ministers to announce a top-up on the previous year’s pay settlement and give more than they had wanted to for the current year.

“Me and other RCN negotiators got every penny they were ever going to give – and that was real money in your banks when it’s really been needed most – but their desire to fix nursing was simply not as strong as ours.”

Ms Cullen urged members to continue to take action in 2024, highlighting an RCN survey that found three in five people have unwavering support for striking nursing staff.

She said: “What’s your appetite to campaign for more? Not just a pay rise but a big commitment to improve staffing levels and patient safety.”

There are now more than 40,000 nursing vacancies in England’s NHS and nursing staff routinely care for 10-15 patients, which the RCN warns is unsafe.

Commenting on new regulations expected to be laid before Parliament in January on how the minimum service levels law will affect strikes by hospital workers, the RCN leader warned: “Despite promises earlier this year that the new Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act would not target nursing staff, we’re now faced with proposals for hospital workers that could see them forced to work during strikes or face the sack.”