If I had a pound for every time a patient told me “you’ll never be out of a job,” I wouldn’t need a job at all. It’s often said with kindness, with compassion and with hope for my future in a profession they have faith in. But it’s sometimes hard to hold onto that hope when faced with the reality we in nursing are confronting daily.

The public’s picture of nursing is largely stuck in 2020 – clap for carers, an NHS “crying out for nurses” and the assumption that any nurse will always find work. The reality in 2026 is almost unrecognisable. Patient complexity has risen, workforce growth has collapsed to an eight-year low, services are being cut, and nurses at every stage face recruitment freezes, progression bottlenecks and frequent redeployment. The workforce the public believes in is not the workforce we are today.

A recent RCN survey revealed a quarter of nurses felt their last shift was unsafe. This month, NHS Confederation polling found 64% of NHS leaders expect to cut services this year and 57% expect to reduce clinical staffing. NHS Employers have told the NHS Pay Review Body that “strict vacancy controls” are making it difficult to recruit newly qualified nurses across the UK. In Wales, Student Streamlining has been postponed, leaving up to half of this year’s graduates without a role. We have graduates from 2024 still without a job. University nursing courses are being cut – Nottingham has suspended its Children’s and Mental Health Nursing programmes, Cardiff and Wolverhampton are reducing nursing provision, and the supply of new nurses cannot afford to shrink.

To those of us working in healthcare, none of this is new. Outside it, much remains unseen. Nursing is one of the UK’s most trusted professions. The public are our purpose, and they support us – but they are not privy to the reality behind isolated headlines. It is a reality too deep-rooted for a sweeping press release to convey, and too often buried in policy documents or behind paywalls that deny visibility and accessibility.

The public see the occasional article, but they do not see the daily allocation board or phone call after phone call to find safe cover. They do not see rejection after rejection, or the late-night Google searches exploring whether a 300-mile family relocation could be economically or logistically feasible. Without public recognition of the scale of what we face, nursing enters every negotiation – on pay, staffing and conditions – without the political weight its public support could carry.

The public see and feel the strain on the NHS. They know it is understaffed and they assume the answer is more nurses. They do not see that nurses are not being hired, courses are being cut, demand is rising, and the profession itself is at risk of erosion. The shift to community care depends on a workforce already stretched beyond capacity, and nowhere is that more visible than in mental health. Demand has risen 38% in three years, while teams have grown just 15%. Half of community mental health nurses say their patients are unsafe because caseloads are too high.

We are often the first to tell our patients that asking for help is not weakness. We hold ourselves to a duty of candour to those in our care. Perhaps it’s time we extended something of that same honesty to the public who depend on us – about what is happening to nursing itself. This is not about complaining or bringing personal concerns to the bedside, but about how we make the reality of the workforce visible at the same scale as one-off coverage – in language the public can grasp and in places they access.

There is an opportunity to mobilise public support for the change nursing needs. But not without first addressing the widening discrepancy between perception and reality