Aibu to think the nurse crisis could be solved if they had an incentive for people to become nurses

[Starsinyoureyes13]

A student nurse doesn't get paid to study and train on the wards. 37.5 hours and due to lack of nurses they are working alongside nurses wouldn't it be better to pay the trainee nurses and give nurses a payrise rather than NHS squandering money on £60 pound an hour agency staff?

Sorry, that was a reply to someone saying back before it was a degree you needed 3 A levels. You didn’t. Now it’s a degree you obviously do, although not in maths.

That's utterly daft. I used to do ten day stints years ago which was bad enough.

We need to stop charging people to become nurses- scrap the tuition fees and give decent bursaries.
We need to pay nurses well.
We need to improve working conditions for nurses. They need proper staffing levels on the wards, they need to be able to take their breaks and not to be working unpaid overtime every shift.
We need to end the bullying from other nurses and managers - this is a huge issue in the NHS.
We have been hiding from addressing the real issues in nursing by raiding nurses from other countries such as the Philippines. Shame on the UK for not getting to grip with these issues. We have had nursing shortages for at least 25 years and have still not solved the problems.

They do this already.

Student nurses also have several maths calculation exams during the 3 year training

You definitely DON'T need A levels to get onto a nursing degree. There are so many accepted qualifications for entry on to programmes, including access courses and at my institution, NVQ with care giving experience.

@Nobetterthansheoughttobe I have to disagree with you. The nature of nursing has fundamentally changed. Patients live longer with greater complexity and more Co morbidity. The work of the nurse is also far more complex and now incorporates much that medics would have historically done.

There is no escaping the fact that research shows that where nurses have a degree qualification, patients are statistically much less likely to die in their care.

Presumably it needs to be a nursing degree of a certain standard for that to be true Restless.

I can't imagine a ward staffed with oceanography and military history grads being all that successful. Though the chat at the desk might be interesting.

Absolutely relates only to nursing degrees!

As others have said, the issue is retention,not recruitment. Attrition rates are through the roof! In her recent report, Donna Ockenden said it is like trying to fill the bath with the plug out, and this is so true! Nurses and midwives are leaving at a faster rate than it is possible to train and recruit new starts.

Working conditions are horrific in many trusts and pay is not reflective of the work involved. We are being treated worse than ever by patients, their families and management, destroying morale and causing burnout.

We are expected to do all mandatory training on our days off and if we fall behind with it and something goes wrong - the trust won't stand over us.

I have never been as stressed or burnt out in my life.

You clearly know best, but tell me, did you train at a london teaching hospital in the late 70s/early 80s? Yes, there were minimum entry requirements at gcse level, but many hospitals asked for higher qualifications

Whenever the subject of nursing gets brought up I am always shocked at the suggestion that it should be dumbed down.

To be fair, proficiency in maths to the level of a middling GCSE grade is required when you’re dealing with drug dosages, yeah?

5 GcSE,/ Olevels s at grade c or above including English and Maths or a science was the entry requirements when I did my training under project 2000 or passing the DC test if someone didn't have the necessary qualifications, Degree training was always available I believe, but most people opted for the Diploma .

Yes, sorry should have been clearer. A levels or equivalent. It’s all about ucas points. Certainly most of my students have done an access course.

but pre degree you did not need a level or equivalent. Just GCSEs. I think I was the last diploma year.

I’m incredibly lucky in that I’ve been nursing for 35 years and still love my job. I’ve been Monday-Friday for the last 17 years and have a good work life balance. I’m in a specialist role so didn’t get re-deployed during covid but did have to pick up the caseloads of my Consultant colleagues.
Despite my experience and band 7 post, I only earn £300 a month more than my 24 year old son who is a mechanic. He takes home £700 a month more than a top band 5! He also works Monday - Friday with no weekend work. No wonder people are leaving nursing to find better paid employment elsewhere.

Other than drug calculations, when I was a band 5, newly qualified nurse, fresh out of university, I was responsible for writing reports for courts giving my opinion on if someone's health made them a risk and giving recommendations on how to mitigate that, checking and signing legal documents to transfer / detain someone, checking doctors had correctly sought consent to treat or where treatment was being given without consent this was documented correctly (because if not the responsibility for anything I gave was mine and would be assault), not just recording but interpreting physical observations, looking for patterns and signs of deterioration, including in people who had taken unknown substances, with the main point of call "hospital at night team" (nurses - on the phone, at least 10 minutes drive away)and the only hope of a doctor either getting a consultant out of bed or a trip to A&E (which would leave the building short staffed). Making choices about restraining, injecting people against their will, placing them in seclusion. Deciding if people were safe to go on leave, who should go with them, managing searches. Managing staff, including supervision, appraisals etc. as well as planning each day which is honestly like a tetris puzzle trying to fit everyone's leave / meds / countersigning / meals / 1:1 obs / other obs / visitors / meetings / time for documentation / staff breaks. And this barely touches the surface (none of the really important stuff of actually spending time with people and supporting them!)

Nurses, even the newest qualified are responsible for so much. They need critical thinking skills, a broad understanding of physical and mental health, ethical and legal issues. They need to be able to weigh up complex and competing evidence quickly. We need to stop suggesting it doesn't have an academic element, it's devaluing people.

Retention though is absolutely the main issue. The amount of good nurses I trained with who have left is so sad, sick of the stress, the pay (not that it's awful but you can get so much more for so much less weight, unlikely to end up in coronors court if you work in a bank), the staffing levels that just feel really unsafe, the assaults on staff and lack of support for that. My own job is pretty good (specialist role) but I still probably look at new ones outside nursing once a week or so.

I think the NHS crisis could definitely be solved, including adequate numbers of all staff groups, if there was a political will to solve it.

It's interesting that so many doctors are being brought from abroad whilst home grown ones refused placements. All it takes is the immigration rules to change in future and there will be a really serious shortage. I wonder who the doctors will be reserved for?

I disagree with this. Research shows nurses with degrees are safer nurses. Also if you haven't got GCSE Maths you may well struggle with drug calculations. And you have to get 100% to pass the drug calculation exams. Nurses need a basic level of Maths.

I had to pass a Maths and English test before being interviewed for my nursing degree.

I agree, and this is something that is frequently overlooked. The collapse of social care is the single biggest problem for the NHS at the moment. In some towns and villages within my HB region (second home hotspots with high house prices and low wages) there are NO carers.

No social carers, mean no discharge, no discharge means no bed availability, no bed availability means no surgery, no surgery means that you have an entire team of a Surgeon, a surgical registrar, an Anaesthetist, and Anaesthetic Reg, an ODP, a scrub nurse, a recovery nurse, all being paid to sit and drink coffee whilst they wait for the bed manager to give them the green light to operate. Think of that combined hourly rate, wasted! Meanwhile the patient who is fasted gets knocked back (for the umpteenth time) the surgeon starts to get skill decay, and nobody wants to be operated on by someone who is out of practice, and the next day it happens all over again.

OR

No social carers, mean no discharge, no discharge means no bed availability, no bed availability means patients become "lodgers" in A&E, no space in A&E means patients wait on ambulances for many many hours (the record in my Trust is in excess of 30), this means a band 6 paramedic and a band 4 EMT sits with an often low acuity patient (for comparison the only other area of the hospital with this kind of skill level to patient ratio is ICU), the patient lies on a stretcher not designed for more than an hour or twos transfer at a push, they develop pressure sores, meanwhile the next patient has fallen in the community, no ambulance is available for them to pick them up, brush them down and put them back to bed, so they lie on the floor developing not only pressure sores but also Rhabdomyolysis, this f*cks their kidneys, so now when ther ambulance crew does get to them, they are a "long lie" that requires admission, they also now have some degree of renal failure, and they take up a bed in hospital long past the point they are fit for discharge because there are NO SOCIAL CARERS.

Pay social carers properly, bring them under the NHS if needs be as they are not fucntioning as a privately funded and managed entity, give them proper terms and conditons, proper pay, access to NHS pension scheme and training schemes, proper qualifications and the respect that these women (and it is predominantly women) deserve.

Then free up the HCPs in the NHS to do the jobs they trained for, using the expertise they worked hard to develop without risk of ever worsening skill decay and all the stress that brings with it.

Controversially, I don't think nursing should ever become a degree profession. It's a vocation.

You're too late, it's been degree level for a number of years.

They need better pay and benefits.

Spidey66 we all know nursing is a profession now where most have a degree!!

The debate is whether the training for nurses should change going forward.

This. I work at a university and recruiting students to healthcare courses is not an issue.

Are you sure? I work closely with Bedfordshire Uni, in Luton. We can't get the minimum amount of nurses and midwives. It's in clearing every year now. And child nursing is in clearing

@Snog
i know. I was responding to the pp who thought it shouldn't become a degree level qualification. It already is.