THINKING back over the last year, who among your acquaintances has had the hardest time of it?

When I ask myself this question, I think about a friend who is self-employed. He was already struggling when the pandemic hit. He didn’t qualify for government support, had to rely on friends and family for help and came close to destitution. The year of covid for him has been a year of insomnia, high blood pressure and despair.

I think of a friend who’s a solo mum and has been working a four-day week while home-schooling her child. There is no second parent around to help. Lockdown for her meant pre-dawn working, a day spent homeschooling and then hours of slog after her wee one’s bedroom light went out.

She felt she couldn’t step back from her professional role because people were relying on her, but got no help with childcare because she didn’t qualify as a key worker.

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Stories like this are everywhere. Another single mum I know was setting her alarm for 4am. A freelancer, she felt unable to turn down work at such a time of economic uncertainty in case her dwindling band of clients stopped ringing. Another, a teacher with a preschooler, was taking classes while her child was amusing herself next door (thank goodness for CBeebies).

It’s been a tough old year for an awful lot of people, but it’s NHS staff who are getting the big “thank you” in their pay packet.

The Scottish Government has made a backdated 4% pay offer to nurses, paramedics, support staff, domestic staff and porters, on top of a £500 one-off payment made last November to health and social care workers.

It’s not in the government’s gift to give pay boosts to people outside of the public sector. Even so, this pay award, billed by health secretary Jeane Freeman as recognition for health workers’ “service and dedication” after “an exceptional year of significant pressure”, has met with mixed feelings among those who feel they have also shown “service and dedication” after “an exceptional year of significant pressure” but endure worse pay and employment terms than NHS staff.

They also wonder how it’s all going to be paid for.

Those feelings are understandable. Politicians have been singling out NHS staff for praise for decades. This reflects the importance the public places on a much-loved institution we all rely on, one that has long been understaffed, but it sometimes gives the impression that health care staff are considered to be uniquely deserving.

Those looking in on the NHS from the outside don’t always agree. They see decent pay, enviable pension arrangements and job security. The hours NHS staff work are sometimes punishing, but then the same is true of people in other sectors, such as agriculture, local government, the voluntary sector and justice.

People also wonder why nurses are being rewarded when adult social care workers, who have lower rates of pay, are not.

All of this is reasonable; after all, the acute impacts of the pandemic go far beyond health care settings. It’s been a multi-faceted crisis.

But this pay boost for NHS staff is the right move, for two reasons.

One is the personal risk taken by some front line NHS staff over the past year, particularly those working each day with covid patients, as well the emotional and psychological burden they have carried. NHS staff have now been vaccinated and have adequate PPE, but the shortage of appropriate protective gear at the start of the pandemic put them at heightened risk of contracting covid; given the high viral load they were potentially exposed to, they were also at heightened risk of serious illness and death.

At least 247 NHS staff have died from covid across the UK.

It’s true that other people are working in settings where they are exposed to the public indoors, such as essential retail and transport staff, and we know that there are other groups who are at higher risk of dying from covid than the general population, such as those in low-paid employment. But healthcare workers on the frontline have supported a client group made up of people who are sick with the disease. That is deserving of recognition.

They have also endured the emotional pressure of looking after people who are very ill or close to death, at a time when families’ visiting rights have been severely restricted. Some nurses have cared for dying patients and distraught families day after day. That is a mighty burden to bear.

Not all of those who receive this pay rise will have been performing these critical front line roles with covid patients and their families, of course. Many won’t have. But the whole service has been affected and in any case, there is another reason why this pay award is important: we need to attract more staff to the NHS.

In 2019, the NHS in Scotland reported record high numbers of nursing vacancies, at over 4,000. As RCN Scotland’s director Theresa Fyffe said at the time: “Our members repeatedly tell us that there isn’t enough of them to do their job properly.”

It is probably this shortage of staff (doctor vacancies are also a chronic issue) which is the greatest single threat to future of the NHS.

Making the nursing profession attractive as a career is critical to staffing the service properly, and this pay award helps to do that. It says: we value NHS staff.

Is there political calculation in the Scottish Government’s move, coming at the eleventh hour before election campaign rules kick in? Of course there is. It gives the SNP a stick with which to beat the Tories.

Having rewarded NHS workers, they must certainly now do what they can to boost pay for social care staff.

There is also a big question about funding such a big-ticket item. The proportion of the Scottish Government’s budget spent on the NHS has grown from two-fifths a decade ago to around half today. Money spent on this pay award is money that can’t be spent elsewhere.

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So the Scottish Government can’t single out NHS staff for special treatment every year.

But this year, the critical role of NHS staff during the pandemic and the pressing need to recruit more staff, make this the right thing to do.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.