My mother was a nurse who trained in the late 1930s, then worked with prisoners of war in Scottish hospitals. My imagination was always fired by her stories, so I went to Edinburgh University to study nursing. The university pioneered teaching of the subject as a graduate profession, although there was a real prejudice back then that nurses shouldn’t be educated. We were “too posh to wash” or “too clever to care”. Nursing’s been a passport to me working all over the world, practically and academically, punting both boats at the same time. What other careers can give you that?

Role models are very important in nursing. Mine was a sister, Elise Nielsen – I worked with her in a specialised surgical ward in my early 20s. She’d encourage us to ask questions and challenge, and she’d do the same with us, constantly. She also made herself available for patients’ families in the ward, pretending to be fiddling at her locker, just so they knew they had access to her. She was a first-class communicator, which is what great nursing is all about.

One patient that’s stayed with me is a man I was in charge of when I was a first-year student nurse. He was in hospital for a lower-leg amputation; he got through the operation well, but one morning I went to see him, eating his porridge, and he looked awful. He’d had an internal bleed unrelated to his surgery, and he started to deteriorate after that, and he died. I was wrecked. But situations like that are important because they deepen your sense of empathy, and your need to provide and receive support and solidarity. They make you realise how important team spirit is in those situations.

Female-dominated professions like nursing and primary school teaching have long lagged behind in terms of career prospects and training, and now we have cuts to continuing professional development. There’s also been the removal of bursaries to support nursing training places in recent years, while the recruitment of medical consultants has gone up by 25%. The double standards are very clear.

Planning blight makes things worse. In Australia, they’ve boosted nurse recruitment over the last decade in response to the expanding numbers of elderly patients. We haven’t. Last year, the number of nurses leaving rather than joining the NHS tripped over into negative balance for the first time. The nursing shortage at the inception of the NHS was recognised by Aneurin Bevan as being so serious he described it as a “national disaster” – it threatened the very viability of the early service. Our profession needs emergency policy action and intensive care if we are to staunch the haemorrhage of staff and hold off the impending crisis.

The idea of the NHS as a drain on society has grown, too, when it should be seen as our biggest asset. Its existence is not just about the provision of healthcare on an obvious level – it’s also a huge employer, the fifth largest in the world. One of the best ways to maintain the health of a society is to keep it in employment, and the upkeep of the NHS is the bedrock of our social security in so many ways. Also, if you educate a nurse, you educate their family, and their community. We need to think of the wider effects, which go far beyond the front door of the A&E department.