After reading your letters page, January 28, I feel that I should support and agree with Alan Hickman and Allan Friswell's views on nurses' salaries.

As far back as Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War, female nurses have been the underdogs of pay.

Nurses have been classed as servants all through time, not addressed as such, but underlying.

In future years, male hospital attendants (orderlies) helped out nurses with tasks. In the early seventies a percentage of males trained to be nurses which has continued to be valued.

My daughter with 25 yeas of nursing around the UK and abroad is a staff nurse in surgical theatre, is now re-deployed with six other theatre nurses to the intensive care ward to give extra support to the nurses working there.

Trained nurses have to be up-to-date with new courses, administrating new drugs, theatre surgery procedures, health and safety. After all, it's life and death of humans in their care.

They are dedicated to their nursing but are only humans themselves, not robots. I'm sure the Royal College of Nursing has put strong views over to get a well-deserved salary for nurses to the Health Secretary to give to the Trusts to administer.

The government has given and promises more finance for the NHS but by building new hospitals, extensions, departments, where are nursing numbers to fill them?

One good thing has been the waiving of NHS car parking which had been long overdue and hoping it will be permanent.

I will be writing to my MP to lobby the Health Secretary.

F Young

Former State Enrolled Nurse