NHS nurses quit after working through Covid – a photo essay

HAnnah Grace Deller works as a children’s matron at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, central London. She is also a trained photographer and during the Covid crisis she began photographing the conditions in which she and her nursing colleagues worked. Some of her images were widely published and exhibited at the time and received praise from Grayson Perry, Martin Parr and others, and inspiring an album by Chris Difford of Squeeze.

She has now published a book, Working on the frontlinedocumenting nurses’ experiences and the public’s response during the crisis and beyond.

Before the pandemic, I had never really taken photos at work – just a few photos when someone was saying goodbye, that kind of thing. I had never actually looked at my work that way before. Work was work, and my camera came out when I left the hospital to relax. For me it is a form of meditation.

Then one day, early in the pandemic, I responded to a beep when I saw a cleaner, in full PPE, locked behind a door, and asked to take his photo. Then I thought: something is starting here. We didn’t know how long it would last, I thought maybe a month. But with the permission of my colleagues, I thought I would document what happened. I didn’t bring a camera, that wouldn’t have been appropriate; I just took pictures with my phone and used my real camera outside of work to document everything else.

This was around the time people were clapping for NHS workers, which was sweet – although most nurses didn’t get off work until 8pm to hear it. As time went on, I think many nurses began to wonder how much that goodwill was worth.

Nurses began protesting over pay and recognition during the pandemic. At a fair wage protest, I started talking to a nurse who said, “I’ve had enough, I’m leaving.” We had received a salary offer of 1% and she said, “Sure, at the end of the day we are worth more than 1%.”

I have always been interested in photographing protests. It’s that spirit you see in people, regardless of whether I agree with what they’re protesting against. But with the nursing protests, it felt a little different.

I started talking to other nurses about the protests, from all different hospitals, who were fed up with it. One of the people I spoke to was Camille, a Frenchman who has always lived in Britain. With Brexit and then the pandemic it was a double insult to her, and she told me she was leaving nursing completely.

We agreed that after I took a photo of her, I would take her uniforms back because she had moved from London, but when I got to her house she had decided to burn them; she said it felt really therapeutic. There is a lot of trauma that can be held in clothes. Many of the stains simply cannot be removed from the uniforms, no matter how hot you wash them. As she turned them over, she said, “There’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears in that fire.”

Nurse Natasha left after the pandemic due to burnout and disappointment surrounding the pay dispute with the government. She decided to travel with her husband. She washed her uniforms and hung them on the line as if for the last time. Natasha played her instrument for the Covid patients and sometimes, when someone was dying, she played music in the ward.

There was also Mila – she wrote ‘RIP nursing’ on the back of her dress. She works on Portobello Road and now sells jewellery.

Ellie also made it through the pandemic, but had enough; I took a few pictures of her giving her nursing uniform back. She was in her twenties and said: ‘I’m just too young to experience this, so much death and upset. I just want to go to Australia and lie on the beach.” There are so many untold stories like this.