Nobody cares for nurses while he is busy caring for others, says Rachael Bletchly – Rachael Bletchly

It's been 35 years since I started my student nurse training, but I remember one of my first lectures very well.

It was about the dying and included a film about a charming woman in her 50s with end stage metastatic bad cancer.

I was impressed by the nurses who took care of her and by the family who had let the cameras film her last days and hours.

And, although desperately sad, he was strangely edifying. The patient's son and daughter held her hands while the nurses watched her, adjusting a morphine infusion and moistening her lips.

She escaped so peacefully that she had to tell her children, "Mom is gone now."

This lesson on the dignity in death has remained long after I stopped badfeeding. Because this woman was the absolute double of my own mother – who died of metastatic bad cancer seven years later.

She was also "well deceased" at the hospital where she was a nurse for 30 years, cared for by her colleagues, with my brother, my sister-in-law and myself.

I thought about it a lot this week and I had a little cry. Because a shocking survey by the charity Nursing Standard and Marie Curie shows that nurses feel they are failing because of NHS cuts.

Two-thirds say that lack of staff prevents them from giving good care and a third are stressed without the support of the bosses.

One of them said: "Ten people died in six weeks, five of them aged 45 to 55 years old. I spoke to a manager about the lack of support from the staff and was told that if I needed help, I may have been wrong at work.

What a shameful way to treat dedicated professionals who strive to facilitate our pbadage.

We are short of 40,000 nurses in England, 200,000 of whom have stopped since the Conservatives came to power. The Ministry of Health says that there are 17,100 more people than in 2010 and 52,000 more in training.

Yet one in four of our wards is dangerously understaffed and the MRC says nurses are "under intolerable pressure".

Julie Pearce, of Marie Curie, said, "There is only one possibility to offer people end-of-life care and, if they do not go well, they can touch a family for years" .

This also affects nurses, as revealed by their heartbreaking survey responses.

"They sacrifice their own well-being to provide care and support," says Flavia Munn, editor-in-chief of Nursing Standard.

"It is high time for ministers to take steps to ensure that there are enough nurses with the time needed to care for end-of-life patients."