NURSES are doing their very best but stress caused by staff shortages has seen some break down in tears on the job, according to one based at York Hospital.

Caitlynn Eckhardt, a respiratory nurse, told GB News: “I think the strikes are really important to highlight what is going on in hospital at the moment.

“Nurses are just so disincentivised to work at the moment, we are working in incredibly difficult circumstances, we are going home after work feeling dissatisfied with the patient care that we have provided and we’ve done our best to provide the best care possible.

“But the situation we’re in is meaning that patients just simply aren’t getting that care.”

She told Anna Riley: “It’s stressful, really, really stressful. It makes our job incredibly difficult to do and it makes us feel terrible.

“In all honesty, the lack of staff at the moment we are seeing first-hand on the wards, the effect it is having on staff.

“I’ve witnessed nurses crying in staff rooms crying in the clinical rooms and just wondering whether or not they should be a nurse anymore.”

Asked about claims that the strikes are making the NHS worse for patients, Ms Eckhardt said: “We’ve gone on strike to highlight these issues and we’re really upset that it’s actually come to this point.

“There have been multiple occasions where we have requested that the Government sits down and speaks to us.

“They keep saying that they’ve given us extra funding. We are not seeing that funding.

“We are seeing potentially that funding being spent completely on agency nurses, which I know for a fact the Government has got, the Conservative government…is profiting from this.”

She added: “So this MP has said that nurses are on an average of 35 grand a year and that is completely false.

“Nurses are budgeting the best that they can. I am seeing nurses use food banks, I am seeing them go heavily into overdrafts just to afford to live in the city that they were born in.

“They are struggling, people can’t even afford to pay for parking potentially, people are struggling struggling for bus fare. We are budgeting the best we can at the moment.”

Asked about the pay demand, she said: “So we all know that 19% probably isn’t feasible, but we are negotiating, we’re wanting to discuss it.

“We need to make nursing look like a profession that is desirable to people, we need the staff and we need to retain people to stop them from going abroad to stop them from going to agencies and the only way to do that is to increase the pay.

“The only noticeable pay difference that we’re going to get is from 10% and above and that is how we’re going to solve a lot of our issues.”