20th June 2017 1:00
By Blue Tutors
In 2016 the government announced that the current academic year (2016-17) would be the last for bursaries which subsidise the study of nursing or midwifery at university. Nursing used to require vocational training but, like many careers, now requires an undergraduate degree. The UK already faces staff shortages of qualified nurses and midwives, and the Royal College of Nursing, among others, warn that the removal of the bursary will only aggravate the already dire situation.
The NHS is currently facing the worst nurse shortage in 20 years, with more than 30,000 vacancies in England alone. The problem is clear: more nurses leaving the profession than entering. The removal of the bursary has already caused a significant drop in the number of applicants compared with this time last year according to UCAS data. There are also large numbers of registered nurses leaving the procession, particularly British nurses. At the same time, the number of overseas nurses leaving is on the rise; while EU nurses only make up 5% of the register, the number of EU nurses applying to work in the UK is down by 94% since the Brexit vote so the UK cannot rely on this previous source of labour to fill the gap.
Now can we incentivise more young people to go into nursing, and how do we make it accessible to them? Potential applicants need to know that nurses are in demand, and it provides a steady career choice with job security in an economy where that is hard to come by. Equally, as a medical job, it is incredibly diverse, offering several routes to entry and multiple career paths and opportunities for specialisation. But to offset the removal of the bursary, there needs to be more financial incentive, currently prevented by the pay cap. These issues need to be addressed in order to encourage more students into nursing, and more nurses to stay. Yet, at the moment there simply is not enough space for all those who do apply for nursing. Traineeships were cut by 10% in 2010 and now two thirds of applicants are not offered a place.
Nursing also has an image problem. Highly female dominated, it needs to find a way to encourage more men into the profession. Equally, most of those leaving, other than retirement or personal circumstances, say it is “disillusion with quality of care to patients” and unsustainable pressures in the workplace that drove them from the profession. And this is no secret. With the state of the NHS and nursing jobs in the news, it does not paint a very appealing picture of life as a nurse in the UK. Nursing needs serious overhaul, from financing to image, if the UK is going to be able to train and retain enough nurses to keep its health system up and running.