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 and real hope for my future in a profession they believe in. Two months from qualifying, it can be hard to hold onto that hope against the reality those of us in nursing confront.

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 found a quarter of nurses felt their last shift was unsafe. In May, 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 – and we still have graduates from 2024 without a job. University courses are being cut: Nottingham has suspended its Children’s and Mental Health Nursing programmes, Cardiff and Wolverhampton are reducing provision, with the RCN warning that the supply of new nurses must not be allowed to shrink. Learning disability nursing is a projection of where this leads – student numbers have collapsed 40% in a decade to fewer than 500 a year, undermining the supply and value of a specialism the NHS cannot do without. At London South Bank University, one of the capital’s largest providers of nurse education, senior nursing academics are being lost to save money – stripping out not only leadership but the expertise that underpins a skilled, safety-critical profession.

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 the visibility and accessibility so urgently needed.

While they might lay eyes on the occasional article, the public do not see the daily allocation board, or the phone call after phone call to find safe cover. They do not see the redundancy notices, the repeated rejections, or the late-night searches weighing 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 undeniably feel the strain on the NHS, but largely at the fringes. The heart of the struggle is masked by the grit, resilience and devotion to patients that, up until this point, has just about held things together. They know it’s understaffed and they assume the answer is more nurses. But do they see that nurses are not being hired, that courses are being cut, that demand is rising, and that 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 clearer than in community mental health. Mental health is the most-cited health concern in the world. Demand has risen 38% in three years, while teams have grown just 15%. Half of community mental health nurses say their caseloads are now too high to keep patients safe.

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 isn’t about complaining or bringing personal concerns to the bedside, but about how we make the reality of the workforce visible at scale, beyond one-off coverage – in language the public can grasp and in places they can access.

There is an opportunity to mobilise public support for the change nursing needs. But not without first closing the widening gap between perception and reality. How do we bridge that divide – and build the support needed to protect patient care, the future of nursing, and the future of the NHS?