"The pressure was just too much

Katy Bradbury, 36, is a registered nurse and nutritional therapist at katybradbury.com and lives in London with her husband and two children. 

When I first became a nurse in 2011, I worked in the gynecology ward at St Thomas’ in London and even 12 years ago, the NHS and its staff were under immense pressure.

I loved my job, but due to understaffing and the constant cuts being made, I was often looking after more patients than I should have and found myself working late to write up my patient notes. As the years went on, it only got worse. I was exhausted from working long hours and my huge workload was stressful.

I left the hospital setting in 2014 and started working first as a health visitor within a local authority, visiting hundreds of families with children under five. It was really intense with more than 800 to 1,000 families on my caseload. I then moved on to working as a family nurse, visiting new mums at home.