Unrelenting stress confronts the NHS.

While Covid was brutal, the subsequent staffing crisis is breaking the staff and the service.

Visiting York’s A&E last week, I met the most dedicated team of clinicians, on their day off, to tell me their story.

Experienced sisters going home in tears as they could not give their patients, nursed in corridors, the dignity their nursing DNA demands of them.

They just wanted their patients to be safe, wanted the time to care, to nurse, to do their job. Instead, overwhelmed, exhausted and spun into a ‘war zone’ and trying to survive.

My tour, on a weekday morning, through the corridors of York’s Emergency Department took me past patients head to toe on trolleys, having first passed nine ambulances queueing outside.

I was shown the makeshift ‘Ready for Transfer’ ward, as patients queued for a bed, and walked past former cupboards, now accommodating sick people.

I was told how patients in waiting rooms were treated in chairs and for one, their husband stood holding up a drip.

This is not the NHS that Labour created 75 years ago, nor the one we restored when last in Government and will after the next election.

But 13 years of Tory neglect has brought the NHS to its knees. Staff not paid, staff leaving early and staff seeking a different career, just to protect their mental wellbeing.

While soldiers leaving the battlefield are honoured, these wounded nurses are left in pieces.

It is the inability to provide the standard of care, dignity and focus that undermines their professional values and purpose, that gnaws away at them day after day.

Sickness in the NHS has shot up. With 9.8m lost days from Covid, figures show that 15.4m were lost due to stress between March 2020 and last September. As more staff leave, this figure rises. Now the NHS is carrying 133,500 vacancies; social care, 165,000.

I felt the sadness and trauma in the makeshift cabin as nurses, doctors and physios shared their stories. But despite all this, I was overwhelmed by the dedication the staff had to one another, their patients, and the NHS.

They loved their chosen vocation, they were so proud of what they did, and their love and care palpable for their patients and each other.

Trauma is what A&E staff deal with every day, however the trauma in the room was something that no-one can bear.

One described it as akin to playing ‘Top Trumps’. Who gets the next bed? The most elderly or the one who has been waiting for hours? When you have to choose who goes into resuss, then you know that life is in your hands.

Despite A&E waits peaking at three days for a bed on a ward - and even now as long as 32 hours - patients shower staff with praise for their kindness and professionalism, for giving the most extraordinary care in the most challenging of circumstances. If you are sick, the doors are still open, but NHS 111, the GP or pharmacy should deal with the every day.

The staff’s final insult came from the Government that is refusing to pay them.

As nurses resumed their strike this week, it is to save the service. The system will implode if more staff leave, as they are doing at an alarming rate. Nurses are leaving to protect themselves; they have no choice. Some go to agencies, not that they want to, but they have to pay their bills.

As I’ve talked to nurses on the picket line, there have been so many tears. The service which they are fighting for has broken them. But as with each life, they will fight to the end for it.

One doctor said the choice he has to make is between this warzone or Melbourn - as Australia really value their staff, give them time to do their job well and pay well. He stayed because he was dedicated to his team.

On one shift you may find up to half the staff as agency, a quarter recently qualified and just a quarter part of the regular team, one nurse said. Inexperience and destabilising of the clinical team presents risk, risk carried by the shrinking number of permanent staff. In the mix you then have a private company Cipher working in the unit, doing what the NHS should. Vocare still runs the Urgent Treatment unit. The menacing private sector, boldly provoking the crumbling NHS.

The NHS is the very best, in the very worst of times. While I will continue my fight in Westminster and meet again with the leaders in Yorkshire this week, I say to York’s NHS staff: you are amazing. Be proud, not just in what you do but in who you are.

Rachael Maskell is the Labour MP for York Central