When I was recently in hospital for almost six months, one of my closest and most impish friends – who knows me very well and figured that I wouldn’t be up for anything serious – would bring me the novels of Betty Neels. Neels is largely forgotten now, but between 1969 and her death in 2001 she wrote 134 novels for the publisher Mills & Boon. Her male protagonists are often Dutch surgeons (her own husband was a Dutch sailor) and the plots are a bit samey: spirited nurse hates arrogant doctor/surgeon/consultant but eventually falls A over T in love with him.

At the same time as I was reading Neels’s novels, I was watching with my devious little hack’s eye the interaction between the doctors and nurses around me, and it couldn’t have been more different. Nurses spoke to nurses, and doctors to doctors; ‘The only time the doctors speak to us is when they want us to do something they don’t want to do,’ laughed one beautiful young nurse. I thought of this when reading about the new threatened doctors strike and how analysis from the Royal College of Nursing shows that ‘nurses pay has been so severely eroded that starting salaries are now over £8,000 lower than if wages had kept up with inflation since........

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