STRIKING nurses outside St Thomas’s hospital in London said today that they felt the government has treated NHS staff with “contempt” and “does not care” about them or their patients. 

Jane, who was on the picket line outside the busy London hospital, condemned ministers for failing to engage in talks with nurses’ union RCN. 

“I just feel like they seem so distant from us, from what we’re going through, that they are contemptuous of us and that they don’t care … and by extension they don’t care about our patients either,” she told the Star.