Manchester plan Nursing holocaust?

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• Find out from your Regional Contact what has offer your services and suggestions. Phone Laura) 0273 553466 for your regional contact.

Raise support for the day of strike action in your union, workplace, estate, shopping centre, school college, nursery, just anywhere you go. •If your local council has a nuclear free zone policy, and many do, demand that the council gives over office space for orgnising for the 24th. Sheffield and Leicester City Councils have already done so. •Plan action for the day itself - we can do ANYTHING, occupy, encirele, decorate, die-in, blockade at military bases, banks, armaments factories and supporting , industries, nuclear bunkers, Ministry of De•Leaflet everywhere, so there can be no excuse for not knowing what's happening on May 24. If you don't have local leaflets, they can be abtained nationally from the London Greenham office. •Demand the support of men. Ask them to take supportive strike action as well, and to help organise creches so children can be looked after and the women are free to take the main action on the day. •Pressure to get unions to support May 24 must now be generated in local branches.' Trades Councils can arrange for every delegate to take support for May 24 into their branches and arrange for speakers from Greenham Common to address meetings. •Help set up local organising meetings, including women's centres, women's groups, minority ethnic women's groups, trade union wo•Labour Party Women's sections can take up the call and show that there are Labour Party rank and file members who are determined to commit the Labour Party to campaign on conference resolutions.

Let's make May 24 the biggest, most successful action yet! WHAT WOULD happen if a five megaton bomb were dropped on Manchester?

Nurses in Manchester have had a rude awakening as parts of secret document covered by the Official Secrets. Act have been made known to them.

This document goes in great detail into the procedure to be adopted if such a bomb is droped.

The full details are available only to consultants, senior, nursing officers and suchlike, but they have to tell the minions below them, the nurses, what they are expected to.do.

90 per cent of the nurses are expected to be 'lost. But senior nursing staff and consultants will go to the local bunker (widely believed to be Heaton Park, site of the Post Office tower, and a cominunications centre).

As the 30-mile wide fireball engults Manchester and surrounding areas, and the blast hits areas as far south as Derby and as far north as Preston, the rest of the surviving hospital staff would be required to organise teams of nurses as conscripts to attend to the injured.

They would not be allowed to go home to be with their families: they would have to go wherever they were told to do.

Armed guards

Armed guards would 'protect' the hospitals, supposedly to stop 'marauding gangs' from attacking them in search of food supplies or drugs. Road blocks would be set up to stop anyone moving.

All the conscript nurses would be issued with radiation counters, but no special protective clothing apart from what there is already in the hospital. They would be equipped with painkillers, and able to treat survivors with coronaries, broken limbs, etc: but there would be no treatment for radiation. Nursing staff would have to assess 'patients' to see if they would survive: if not, presumably, no treatinent' (painkillers) would be administered.

The first draft of this document is believed to have appeared roughly two years ago, around the Save South London Hospital Campaign meets every Thursda time 'Protect and Survive' was published. Nurses feel sure that there are much more detailed plans than this, and that civil defence plans have been well What you can do: fence Offices. men's groups, anti-cuts campaigns, etc.

Hiroshima after the Bomb implanted in the higher echelons of the hospital administration.

Recently nurses in Manchester have been issued with identity cards, supposedly for their own protection against unauthorised visitors in hospitals at night. Some nurses now suspect that there is more to these ID cards than meets the eye - all have a picture and the rank of the member of staff, and they could clearly be used as already been planned, Brighton (Carmel or an aid to conscripting them efficiently.

The document once again shows how absolutely useless is the advice given in Protect and Survive. Whitewashing windows is utterly • pointless when the whole area for 30 miles around will be caught in the midst of a raging fireball.

IT IS almost impossible to judge whose picture of the health service 'On Duty' is.

Everything seems to be there. Low wages, closures, racism, harassment, and yet nothing seems quite right.

It is a play in which there is little characterisation and fewer contradictions, where every character delivers their own slogans dutifully without ever becoming real. In fairness it is a black play with one black hero, two black heroines, one black clown and one white heavy.

I winced. The audience seemed to enjoy it. Perhaps it reflects something I was never aware of and nobody bothered to explain to me.

The story is loosely based on the struggle at St. Mary's Hospital in Paddington, London. As result of the cuts, wards are being closed, ward orderlies are being forced to do two or three jobs, low pay and bad conditions hang over the play like a cloud. An orderly has died of overwork and Phyllis, the real heroine of the play, begins to see that the NHS is murder machine for its employees.

Sister Parks represents both patronisation for Phyllis as a good worker who she has had working relationship with for 19 years, who hasn't struck, and later she shows the face of open racism The Tories' Civil Defence is a horrific charade - a few selected top people can go in the bunkers and the rest of us can burn to death.

Can a better case be made for nurses and other health workers to respond to the call made by the Greenham Common women for a day of strike action against Mick Woods, ex TGWU shop steward at St Mary's hospital, London W9, reviews 'On Duty. The play is showing at the Factory Community Centre, 107 Mathias Rd, Islington, on April 21; at St Matthews Brixton on April 27; at Tottenham Community Project on April 28; and at the Factory, Chippenham Mews, on April 30 & May 1.

Colin delivers. the real moments of humour in the play delivering his Sidney Poitier or Victor • Romero schtick to the No.25 1983 Aprif Paper of the women's campaign Movement Fightback for Women's Rights the missiles on May 24?

The fight should be taken up in every hospital and health union - branch for meetings to discuss strike action on that day - coordinated with action led by other sections of women workers in industry and local government, and with local demonstrations, protests, and meetings on the day. bewildered Phyllis. In the end Phyllis abandons her old ways, tells Sister Parks she won't cooperate with the ward closure and heads off to a union meeting to organise resistance.

As I said earlier, it is more of a play for black people than for trade unionists. Significant was the dearth of hospital workers in the audience, proving, I suspect, that this play would ring few bells.

The characters aren't hopsital workers but mouthpieces. Although well acted, the play never comes alive. Perhaps the struggle in the NHS will have to wait for better.

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at Balham Food & B Co-op, High Street, Women in struggle