Nurses bore the brunt of the pandemic, with low staffing levels and difficulties accessing protective equipment, according to England’s former chief nurse. Dame Ruth May told the Covid inquiry the NHS had been understaffed in 2020, in part because of the “catastrophic decision” to cut financial support for student nurses in 2015. Resources had been "stretched", particularly in intensive care, she said, with a knock-on effect on the care some Covid patients received.
And she had been aware of widespread reports of problems supplying personal protective equipment (PPE) in March 2020, including a shortage of plastic gowns that had left front-line nurses living "in fear". Dame Ruth, England’s chief nurse from 2019 until July 2024, was one of the senior figures who appeared at Downing Street news conferences during the pandemic. She had also volunteered for nursing shifts during Covid, at times working "under the radar" in hospital wards, the inquiry heard.
“We were facing some extraordinarily difficult decisions in the very early part of pandemic,” she said. “It was a fast-moving environment - we were seeing [a large] number of cases coming in and deaths like we had never seen before.” The NHS had entered the pandemic with about 40,000 nursing and midwifery vacancies in England, Dame Ruth said.
And she criticised a “catastrophic decision”, in 2015, to replace the grant or bursary paid to student midwives and nurses with loans. It had led to reduction of about .