WRITE in response to Stephen Warren “Tuition fees” (HAS, May 11) and I wholeheartedly agree with his sentiments about charging student nurses, now working on the coronavirus frontline, tuition fees.

I have worked in the NHS as a nurse for the best part of 30 years in a number of the local trusts. It is a job I wholeheartedly enjoy.

With regards to the calls to scrap tuition fees, it needs to happen. I think the recruitment of the half-a-million volunteers to assist during the current pandemic shows how short the NHS is of essential staff.

For many years, successive governments refused to give more than one per cent or no pay rise to NHS staff while awarding themselves bumper rises. Are they not in effect public sector workers like us?

I hear how much the government values us, what a wonderful job we do, but talk is cheap.

Real investment is needed, reduction of creeping privatisation and proper year-on-year pay rises to encourage people to take doctor, nursing, ancillary posts within the NHS and to reduce the large number of vacant posts we have.

We need fewer managers and more staff on the front line. We need proper preparedness for situations like this and to ensure we are never short of PPE nationally again.

Get British companies making more, and if we stockpile their equipment, we need to review and replace it yearly by putting stockpiled PPE into circulation.

We have a lot to thank the public and private businesses for who have donated many items to help the staff who are treating critically ill patients.

Staff who have died in their jobs due to insufficient PPE, this must never be allowed to occur again.

The public also need to keep observing lockdown to protect themselves, their loved ones and the NHS.

So I say thank you to Mr Warren for his letter and the points he raises, to all my colleagues in the NHS and to the people who have donated items to the NHS, it is much appreciated.

Also to the public by doing their bit and staying home.

Rhys Maybrey, Middleton St. George.