Indigo

I got a stethoscope tattooed behind my ear on my 18th birthday. My mum thought I was mad, but I'd known since I was seven that I wanted to be a nurse. I'd spent hours in the John Radcliffe Hospital watching the nurses care for my nan, seeing how they could make someone feel safe even when everything hurt. My dad worked at the Mini plant in Cowley and my mum was a teaching assistant, but they both believed in that dream. I worked weekends at Boots all through sixth form, saving every pound for university.

In 2019, I applied to Oxford Brookes University for adult nursing. I'd done my research. The course was exactly what I wanted. When I went to the open day in February, I sat in a lecture theatre with maybe forty other people, but there were easily a hundred empty seats. The facilities were incredible – simulation wards that looked like the real thing, mannequins that could simulate every kind of medical emergency. The lecturers talked about how desperate the NHS was for nurses, how we'd be guaranteed jobs before we even graduated.

Two months later, I got a letter saying the course was full. Full. I'd seen those empty seats with my own eyes. I called the admissions office and the woman I spoke to sounded exhausted. She said they'd had to turn away hundreds of applicants despite having capacity. When I asked why, she said, "There is no funding for the training places we need."

I waited a year and applied again in 2020. This time I was accepted. I handed in my notice at Boots, bought my textbooks, sorted out my student loan. Two weeks before the course was supposed to start, I got another letter. Oxford Brookes was withdrawing my place because Health Education England had cut their funded training places from 180 to 120. The course coordinator called me personally. She was almost in tears. She said they'd had to turn away sixty students who'd already been accepted, all of them ready to start, all of them wanting exactly what the NHS said it needed.

I spent the next year working as a healthcare assistant at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre. Every shift, I watched qualified nurses working flat out, covering extra wards, staying late because there simply weren't enough of them. The ward managers said the same thing over and over: "We desperately need more nurses but there's no budget for training." It sounded reasonable. Everyone nodded. I nodded too.

In 2021, I tried again. Same story. Same letter. Same apology about funding cuts. But this time, something felt wrong. I started paying attention to what I could actually see, not just what I was being told.

Last summer, I was walking past the Oxford Brookes campus on my way to work. It was supposed to be term time, but the nursing building looked deserted. I could see through the windows into the simulation labs – the same ones I'd admired on that open day three years earlier. They were completely empty. Brand new equipment was still sitting in boxes. Ventilators, monitoring devices, IV pumps – everything a nursing student would need to learn on, all of it gathering dust.

I got talking to the security guard. He'd worked there for fifteen years and he was frustrated. He told me three nursing lecturers had been made redundant in July, despite student demand being higher than ever. He said the lecturers had been training nurses for decades, but apparently their posts were "unaffordable." Meanwhile, he was guarding empty rooms full of unused equipment that had cost more than those lecturers' annual salaries.

That's when it hit me. The government that prints every pound note in my wallet was telling me it couldn't find enough pounds to train people who were standing right there, ready to work. The people existed – I'd met dozens of them in the same situation as me. The teachers existed – three of them had just been sacked. The equipment existed – I could see it through the window. The need existed – every ward I'd worked on was understaffed.

So what exactly was it that "there was no money" for? The pounds weren't missing. The buildings weren't missing. The people weren't missing. Someone in Westminster had simply decided not to spend the money that would connect all these things together. That wasn't an accounting problem. That was a political choice dressed up as a financial impossibility.

I'm considering moving to Reading now. My friend Imogen managed to get a training place there, but even she tells me the waiting lists are getting longer every year. We talk about it sometimes – how we're both clever, both dedicated, both exactly what the NHS says it needs, but somehow the system can't find room for us. It's not because we're not good enough. It's not because the training doesn't work. It's not because hospitals don't need nurses.

It's because someone decided that the government that issues pounds can somehow run out of pounds. They took a political decision about spending priorities and wrapped it in the language of mathematical impossibility. I used to accept that. I don't anymore.

I understand now that this isn't just my story. It's happening in every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare. The cupboard belongs to the institution that issues the currency. It's only bare if they choose not to fill it.