Nurses face eviction from staff housing – Guardian
February 1st, 2012
UPDATE: 25/5/18 Royal Free sells Queen Mary House
UPDATE: 9/1/18 Now a report from the NEF No Homes for Nurses
UPDATE: 11/06/17 Better late than never. Pity they sold them off in the first place. Thank goodness the NHS still owns most of the land.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jun/10/nurses-homes-nhs-staff-shortfall
https://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/jan/31/nurses-face-eviction-staff-housing
This makes me very angry, comment to Guardian below:-
1 February 2012 2:07PM
This is absolutely appalling news but sadly only too predictable. When the police section houses (behind police stations) started to go I seem to remember being told that the police preferred to live with their families (wives and children) and that demand for bachelor (of either gender) accommodation had fallen away.
Even were that entirely true, which I doubt, the case for nurses must be stronger for on site accommodation because the a lot of the training takes place at the hospital and proximity is all. I can’t help feeling this applies to all the emergency services but I’ll leave that for now.
It looks to me to be one of those short sighted decisions which in five, ten or twenty years will have to be reversed but by then the land needed for the onsite accommodation will be in other hands.
Having visited nurses homes for both business and social reasons thirty years ago I can confirm that they were well run and happy places, ideal for young single women at the start of their careers in nursing.
Quite why everything now has to have a price, regardless of utility, strikes me as the kind of shortsighted thinking that is so typical of a political viewpoint that regards everything communal, civic, public, utilitarian as undesirable and everything private, profit making, individual and competitive as an ideal to work towards.
The society in which I grew up, in the 1960/70s is being destroyed piecemeal and it is heartbreaking to witness. The postal service, from cross subsidised universal provision towards total privatisation. The railways, whose track maintenance had to be brought back under one roof. The libraries now under threat. Now the nurses homes. And toilets.
What will it take to bring common sense back to the decision making process???
Don’t tell me a change of Government because so called New Labour were as bad…