The Pandemic has highlighted the shortage of Nurses in the NHS and the need to finally face up to this and rectify the situation. The press has been portraying nurses in a negative light for a long time, consequently falling numbers of students have been brought to attention by the RCN since 2107, yet the press do not consider how understaffed the entire system is. The morale is therefore low and is matched by low pay. How is it right that a newly qualified nurse earns very little more than a supermarket worker?
Current policy is to procure foreign nurses at great expense. This is so unnecessary. A few minor adjustments could resolve this issue.
Firstly, the Government has recently re-introduced the bursary to student nurses at £5k. This is ridiculous, it was £5k twenty years ago. The Nurse training itself needs to be re-marketed as an Apprenticeship with a fair rate of pay to reflect the work that students actually do. The holidays do not need to match school holidays, less would mean more opportunity for ward based placements. Secondly, what is needed most of all is local people working in local hospitals, not imported people. If a hospital Trust could offer a money incentive to encourage local youngsters to train in their local University and hospital, when qualified they would stay for their whole career. The amount of money it costs to set up foreign interviews, fly over British staff to conduct them, complete all the visa paperwork, all the flights and enhancements, the six month rehabilitation in this country with further training and the accommodation costs are astronomic. If a little thought and effort was put in, local student nurses could be procured at a fraction of the effort and cost and with no time lost. In addition to a bursary, an Apprentice/student nurse could be offered an annual bonus for each year of study and a final lump sum when a job is secured in their local Trust hospital upon qualifying.
This could all be achieved with much less effort and expenditure than the current system of foreign procurement. The Philippine and Indian nurses are generally a lot smaller than the British nurses and struggle with the increase of obesity making patients heavy to manage. They struggle with our social system’s amount of rules and paperwork and the great age and therefore frailty of our population. Most of them fulfill their contract and quickly transfer from the hospitals into the community and mostly to Care Homes. This means wasted money and back to square one with not enough nursing staff within hospitals.
This adjustment would not be difficult to implement as the infrastructure already exists and would save money at the same time as increasing the nurse numbers. The morale would be boosted if all the vacancies were filled and the existing nurses were not so terribly overworked. This would improve the overall standard of care in all British hospitals.
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