This is normally the week of the year when this space reminds you of the importance of thinking about our emergency services over Christmas.

Indeed it is. But it also a reminder of the plight faced by those who transport the sick and ill to hospital; a plight shared by those who nurse and care for those in need.

For the first time since nurses were organised, we now have the sight of thousands of those who do so much of the heavy lifting in our medical services, picketing by the side of the road in an effort to earn a decent wage.

It takes a special kind of person to become a nurse, one who has the grace and compassion to look after the sick and dying, the ill and the ailing. For many, it is a calling, a vocation, not a job that can be walked away from at the end of the shift.

These nurses who are now striking — and they deserve our full support — are the same body for whom we were urged to stand on our doorsteps each Thursday night and clap and cheer.

We live in a time when our governments suffer from collective amnesia — how they have forgotten the words of praise for sacrifice and dedication they lavished on the profession and health service though the darkest days of the pandemic. Yet now, two years later, the same ministers choose to forget the words they utteared.

Talk is cheap. Nurses’ pay isn’t.

Ambulance crews across Wales are in the same boat, forced to take industrial action for better wages and conditions.

They too deserve our support.

When a call for help is made in the desperate moments after illness or injury, these crews should be there to help.

But our social care system is broken — not a single community nursing bed exists now in Ceredigion — and those who ought to be living in these facilities instead occupy beds in hospital wards.

This means our emergency wards are full because there are too few beds. And our ambulance crews cannot unload their patients into full A&E departments.

Do not blame nurses for having had enough. Do not blame ambulance crews either; nor too few doctors with too many cases.

The blame for this rests firmly on successive Westminster governments. This is a crisis solely of their making, with the Senedd having little wriggle room to find solutions.