I KNEW when I married a nurse that she was as committed to the NHS and her patients as she was to me.

All of us that have partners who work in the National Health Service are familiar with the long shifts, the emotional drain, the scrutiny and mental pressure that they work under every day.

I was a construction worker when I met my wife, who was then just starting on the old four-year degree as a student. 

While I could leave the job and switch off as soon as the cement mixer was washed out at the end of the day — it’s just bricks and nails, plaster boards and scaffolding after all — she couldn’t just walk away and leave a patient. 

Because patients are people and our nurses really do care. Whether it’s someone just needing reassurance or another who’s horribly ill, our nurses will stay with them and, while it may not be talked about, they bring those worries home with them when they eventually do clock off. 

They could hand over a patient they’ve cared for and walk in the next day to find that they’d died overnight. 

The feelings of guilt, the sadness and loss, the questioning if they could have done more or if they’d missed something and compassion are all part of the daily life of our health workers. I’ve lost count of the number of funerals she has been to.

My wife left the NHS after 22 years’ service to become a nursing lecturer. 

Burned out and frustrated by a lack of staff and resources, but just a statistic to this government — just one of the thousands who have left the NHS but are now being requested to go back in. 

I know she feels a sense of duty and that draw to go back and help her former colleagues and patients. 

But during a global pandemic without the correct PPE? Not a chance. I wouldn’t have been allowed on a building site without my hard hat and steel toe-capped boots at a minimum, so why should the health and safety in a hospital — or our care homes — be any less?

When you clap on your doorstep with your neighbours for the NHS, please remember the decade of cuts and underfunding imposed by the Conservative Party. 

Remember them cheering in the House of Commons when they voted down a pay raise for our health-service workers. For those claps will ring hollow without real change.