The government embraced gestures to support the NHS yet it would seem nurses are there to be seen and not heard, writes columnist Ed McConnell...

As we stood on our doorsteps banging pots and pans and smashing our colander-clad heads into walls as Captain Sir Tom Moore hobbled past and drivers sounded their horns who among us could have foreseen this?

If you'd told us then within three years nurses would dare to desert their posts in a selfish bid to earn a living and raise concerns about a health system crumbling around them, we'd have hurled our wooden spoons to the ground in disgust and my neighbour might have switched his infernal disco machine off for good.

Boris Johnson, for all his flaws, at least crawled from his Lulu Lytle-designed pillow fort to Clap for Carers.

Yet now we learn all that cheering and singing and stamping of feet was in the name of an under-resourced and neglected health service. Astonishing.

Except it's not. Every Christmas for the past decade our A&E departments have been creaking at the seams with sick people crammed into corridors for hours, even days, as they await a bed.

Sometimes it happens earlier than Christmas, sometimes just after. Once I spent a day at Medway Maritime Hospital – which yesterday became so busy as ambulance strikes stopped bosses declared a critical incident – to witness this first hand.

The woman responsible for sorting this out was remarkable. She was playing a giant game of Tetris with human bodies.

Old men and women, many living through their final years on earth, didn't need to be in the hospital anymore.

But there they were looking for the most part thoroughly miserable and with nowhere to go.

We unfairly call them 'bed blockers' but that implies some fault on their part.

They've done nothing wrong and nor have the staff looking after them. The community care just isn't there. The wider social care system is seriously ill.

The NHS is not perfect, nor would any organisation of its huge scale be.

Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting is also not perfect but was unfairly chastised when he suggested reform might be needed to make sure the service is functioning well.

That's how any industry survives and improves.

'Nurses are there to be seen and not heard it would appear...'

But the frontline staff working long, draining shifts for often pitiful sums aren't to be blamed for that.

Now they have had enough and are going to extreme lengths to show us the true scale of the problem.

But how do the government and some among us respond? They tell them they're putting lives at risk and should never have been allowed to go on strike in the first place.

This speaks to a wider problem with Britain.

Those in power embrace empty gestures yet when the electorate starts voicing dissent they are told their actions will kill people if they're not careful.

Nurses are there to be seen and not heard it would appear.

Captain Tom was held aloft as an NHS mascot by politicians across the spectrum.

Was it a good thing his actions led to almost £40 million being raised for the NHS? Obviously. Would he have received the same support if he'd coupled his garden laps with scathing remarks about the way care staff are treated? I'm not so sure.

Maybe he was there to be seen not heard, too?

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