Nursing degree disaster

@Focussingonme most hospital banks and agencies say you need 6-12 months experience before you can sign up.

I agree with the others, I work in the NHS (not a nurse but with nurse educators) and while there are still officially recruitment freezes, clinical staff are the exception.

Get yourself on the staff bank at all your local trusts and when you sign up ask which agencies they work with and join those too. The easiest way to get a role is to get into the ward and build relationships. There is a move to make good bank/agency staff substantive because of government targets on temporary staff and spending so it's a good way "in" through the backdoor.

Mental health nurses used to be more challenging to get into general wards, but as the police have withdrawn support for MH patients many trusts are looking to have that specialist support build into the team especially in areas like emergency care.

Good luck with it, something will come up. The MH nursing route is challenging but rewarding and once you find your feet you'll do great!

Aside from your job finding difficulties, which sound incredibly demoralising - how is it morally right that we ‘steal’ nurses trained in India- surely India need them?

Podiatrist.

What’s a pod please?

This is unfortunately happening all over the NHS. All of the NHS ambulance Trusts have a recruitment freeze for NQPs. Hundreds of students are graduating and there are no jobs for them.

I qualified as a RLDN last Sept. No jobs in my placement trust so I looked further afield. I got a job in a different trust which is about 35 miles from home. Been there almost year now. Other LD and MH students took jobs in prisons and care homes. Some didn’t apply for their pin and worked as bank hca for a time and applied for jobs later when it was outside the period graduates were applying.
It's truly awful after all the work and effort we put in and all the debt we qualify with.

I know Mumsnet often has detractors but this thread is a great example of how it helps.

Tbh it’s the same for many other sectors, entry level jobs but want experience - I mean marketing etc! Bonkers

@Rye0179 did you see the one I posted (on page 3)

It usually does
I qualified in 1996 and there was an abundance of jobs ,yet a few years later newly qualified nurses were struggling to get jobs a others say it goes in cycles but it incredibly frustrating

are they are charities hiring?

Haha I know it's ridiculous.

Where on earth are you managing to find pods?!!! They’re like hens teeth 😂

@Studyunder 100% this. Plus the stress of working alongside somewhat ‘differently’ qualified developing world staff, many with surprisingly poor English, trying to help them, keep the patients safe, protecting your PIN or HCPC registration in the knowledge you’ll get the blame for ‘allowing’ their feck-ups.

Disclosure. I left. It was unsafe, and deeply frustrating and madly stressful. I could just about cope with any amount of stress brought about by the nature of the job, but when it’s caused by the skills-deficit in your ‘internationally trained’ colleagues, while all the B7 middle managers trill ‘nothing to see here!’ as they WFH.

I now do private ‘bank’ MRI.

What about school nursing of health visiting?

Prison is amazing. I did a 7 year stint in a mens prison and absolutely loved it.
I'm not nursing any more for health reasons I'm doing podiatry and we're so short staffed we're dragging pods in off the street by their hair and making them work for us.

Try prisons. In my area they definitely take newly qualified mh nurses.

It’s no comfort but we had some excellent student radiographers qualify this summer who are unemployed.

The radiology department is full of middle eastern and Nigerian staff, many as agency; the CT/MRI is entirely Nigerian, Indian and Filipino. All 20 of them. This does not reflect any diversity in the city which couldn’t be more white if it tried. We are also talking one if the most desirable places to live outside London, so it’s not like they were struggling to find people willing to work here.

It is ridiculous and untenable. But, the tide will turn again. Please don’t be too disheartened, but I utterly understand your frustration.

It'll be a pay drop compared to what you would get for an NHS band 5 role, but you will be able to walk into a job as a support worker, especially in the private sector.

I’m an AHP. When I qualified 20 years ago there was an NHS wide recruitment freeze. The situation goes in circles but it been a steady decline in overall numbers since back then. There’s such a massive misunderstanding of the NHS and the problems with lack of clinical staff. The number of middle management that now exist “in order to sort out these problems” is obscene….
Understaffed yet we reduce the number of training places/close courses completely. Charge huge fees and get new graduates with huge debts and no jobs due to budget cuts. Pay recruitment fees to get people from abroad. Burnout existing staff by cutting admin support and adding it on top of the clinical workload. Charge the patient record software to that of a Tory MP’s business. This useless software alone has tripled the time our admin takes and is not user friendly. Resolve the lack of senior staff problem by creating apprenticeship positions which require senior staff to oversee and be held clinically responsible for their work, so we have to teach, oversee and sign off their work in addition to our own ever expanding roles. Sell off community buildings for income generation. Then have no space for fully qualified staff on the rare occasion we are allowed to recruit. Once qualified the apprentices think fuck this, I swan off after my free training and set up my own private business and/or move to another country to work for way better pay and conditions.
I could go on for a very long time as that just a snippet of what goes on!
One of the reasons it’s so disheartening is that we know what we could achieve if we just had enough clinicians and clinics.
Drop all fees for all medical courses, create a golden handcuff to work within the NHS for 10 years…. It wouldn’t fix everything but it’d be a bloody good place to start!
Aaand rant over (for now).
Gold medal to anyone who bothers to read all that 😂

If you'd be interested in prison healthcare, apply even without prison experience. There is a need for RMNs in prisons and their healthcare providers often struggle to recuit nurses generally.

Have you tried any of the Mental Health charities? They sometimes have vacancies for RMN's. Mind, Rethink and Beat (the Eating Disorder charity) might be good places to start.