Budget does not consider whole NHS picture

Editor - The focus of the budget was, as expected, the NHS and especially increasing the recruitment and pay and improving the career structure for nurses. What a vote winner: it plays on public sympathies.

When I am not being a medical student, I work odd shifts as a healthcare assistant. Most patients automatically assume I am a nurse because of the duties I perform, although they are confused as to the difference in uniforms. My roles vary little from those of trained members of staff, from both the more traditional caring duties such as washing, feeding, and making the beds, to more medical tasks such as carrying out temperature, pulse, and respiration observations and blood glucose checks.

Most nurses see healthcare assistants as vital members of the team, and treat us with according respect. The only main roles we do not carry out are setting up intravenous lines and dispensing drugs (although the actual work—that is, popping the tablets down the patients throat—is up to us). NHS reform surely, therefore, needs to encompass every aspect and every member of staff and not be used as a political weapon by ministers.

The irony is that I have do this work—although I enjoy it thoroughly—in addition to a full curriculum of medical studies, because trainee doctors have to totally self fund their undergraduate education for five years. Compare physiotherapists, chiropodists, and, yes, nurses, whose tuition fees are paid for and who qualify for grants. It is time the government did something radical and looked at the whole and not simply the wider picture.