Nursing - Student training slashed
WORKERS, JUNE 2007 ISSUE
Alongside the chaos in doctor training arrangements, the government has generated an equally damaging crisis in nurse education and the allied health professions. Thousands of newly qualified nurses have not been employed, though workloads are the same or higher. The same pattern has been seen across the allied health professions, with newly qualified physiotherapists, occupational therapists and others not gaining employment.
This short term crisis management is now having a profound effect on education of future professionals as training budgets are being raided to pay off deficits. After a period of expansion in student nurse numbers to meet shortages, there is now a reduction of commissions for training places. The scale of these reductions has not been officially acknowledged by the Department of Health but the true extent is now being revealed by the universities that employ the nursing lecturers and which are making redundancies.
Examples include the University of East Anglia, where a third of nurse lecturers could lose their jobs as a result of 28 per cent fewer students being commissioned. Oxford Brookes University says 13 nursing lecturer posts will be "lost" by 2008. The University of Southampton has reported a 14 per cent cut in student numbers this year, with a further 9 per cent reduction for next year. The University of the West of England has cut the number of nursing students and frozen ten nurse lecturer posts.
In denying jobs to newly qualified students, the government is wasting three years of spending. In making nurse lecturers redundant it is abandoning years of skills development and decades of experience.
Unemployed newly qualified nurses, overworked nurses in clinical practice and nursing lecturers have a common cause with other professions across the NHS. Action is needed across the service.