Why nobody wants to be a nurse.

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I just wanted to raise awareness of why we are struggling to train nurses. I'm a third year student and just completed a 8 week placement where I had to drive 1.5 hours each way driving on top of 12.5 hour shifts. I have a disability which long driving has a detrimental impact on my health. I also have caring responsibilities and limited financial support so we effectively pay to train. You also have to do assignments and exams on top.

I got a choice of defer the placement so lose hours (not get my pin on time) or get on with it. I enquired about funding for a hotel which was ignored. Non drivers are regularly being sent 2 hours each way on top of 12.5 hour placements which makes them drop out. When I enquired with this to the university they said nursing requires resilience. Many nursing roles allow you to go part time and I have found a job very close to my house which wouldn't require the insane commuting times. Just after I finished a 8 week placement , I received a snotty email on Sunday night saying an admin mistake made by my assessor could result in me having to redo all the competencies, I have already achieved so years of hard work. At the moment I wanted to scream and say fuck it.

The whole system needs reworking , nurse training is a punitive unrewarding experience and I can understand why so many don't want to go through it. I am already doubting whether I want to do it because I feel beaten down by the training already.

We used to be counted in the numbers with the HCAs. On many of my placements I barely worked with my mentors as I was always sent off to “help” the HCAs. By my 3rd year I still hadn’t done a drug round properly as the nurses never had time to teach me. I was a fucking black belt master at making beds though.

Change fields to MH /LD most of them are lovely and understanding, when I worked within general it was a different story. The only people who have kept me going is the lovely people on shift certainly not the university.

It’s a good idea but only the big teaching hospitals would have the facilities required. Local District Generals don’t tend to.

Technically we aren’t suppose to be counted but yes we are lol. One shift there was two hcas and one nurse for an entire 12 hour shift, obv no one got a break at all but you literally have no choice and can not leave the patients. I was on a 24 mixed adult dementia ward with three patients who were 1:1 at all times due to their vulnerability and / or violence . So that was fun and the nurse snapped and just screamed at us all, all night. Then the ward manager would come and ask why hand over wasn’t done or checks etc. we literally couldn’t . I love being a nurse but it is the uni crap and ridiculas tasks, tick boxes and extra essays and exams due the same week your driving to placement for four hours, getting home at 10 , eat your tea , lucky to get a shower and then get up at 4 to be at placement for 7 am start again. I know this is life for a lot of nurses but I would never take a job that required that . It’s slightly different for students as most of us have to do 5-7 days a week to make our hours up to graduate where
most nurses to three - four shifts and they wouldn’t do 5 back to back night shifts

This is what I mean they lose good potential nurses because of how difficult logistically it is to do the course. It's so inflexible nothing like a job!! Literally you have to jump through hoops to get there no wonder many cannot or don't wish to finish.

Why would anyone want to pay thousands and end up in debt to be treated like shit constantly by the general public and your employer? Nursing is notorious for bullying and stress! All for shit wages!

Ward managers deliberately put students on at weekends instead of HCAs to make the payroll cheaper.

One Sunday I was the only Staff nurse for 16 patients on a general surgical ward. I had a student nurse with me who was supposed to be supernumerary.
After my shift I did an incident report re staffing. And drove the poor student home as she’d have to take 3 buses home.
They way we treat our young student nurses is appalling.

Yanbu OP

How sad to see outdated, unproductive attitudes alive and well:

The unnecessarily long, dangerous shifts
The "computer says no" when students find equivalent placements closer to home
The bureaucratic blinkered outlook "you will have to redo your competencies and that's that"
The patronising attitudes towards young people who value their time, their skills and their mental health. "Not cut out for this", "no resilience", "it's a vocation"
The "I had it tough in my time and you will suffer, too. It's the only way". God forbid we should have a happy, productive, well paid and well rested workforce.

Meanwhile Australia is openly campaigning to poach British workers. It amazes me that anyone would go into nursing these days, I am full of respect and admiration for you guys.

Something has gone very wrong on these training courses requiring placements. I did teaching and that was shit too. No one should ever have to pay to work, the travel expectations are ludicrous, you get treated like dirt and senior ‘colleagues’ take the absolute piss. There is rarely much direction given and then they can fail you or put in complaints because of imagined slights, their lack of direction and because… they don’t like you and don’t want you there essentially. It has given senior colleagues who qualified in much less strenuous time far too much power to guard the doors to their little social clubs, oops of course I meant professions.

This was my experience of nurse training too. I was so poor I remember praying for the end of the final placement so I didn’t have to keep wearing broken shoes.

uni were unhelpful (putting students who lived at home and had a car on local placements, and students who had no transport or money (me) 60 miles away at hospitals with no reasonable transport options.

the misery of all you get exposed to on wards etc the never ending stress of the course and the exams. Bitchy staff who hate students being unkind to you.

besides having a baby with colic, the final year of a nursing degree is the hardest thing I've ever endured.

pleaee don’t give up now. Doing a nursing qualification has been the best decision of my life, I’ve used it to do several versatile and interesting jobs, I’ve never worked nights as a registered nurse (chose different jobs), and I’ve never been without a job to go to.

stay strong, give the uni feedback on the evaluation and look forward to the end of it xxxxxxx

I felt this to my core. I left med school in my penultimate year. Everything you said, unsupportive seniors, mental health, undiagnosed chronic illness. Yup - when I asked for some leeway, I was told to toughen up. When I asked for leave to attend a funeral - I was told medicine had to come first. The list goes on.

I briefly considered retraining from my corporate job, to become a nurse.
Once I realised that I'd have to essentially use my savings to pay myself a salary for 3 years whilst working for free, then come out on a starting salary of 1/3 of what I'm currently earning, with my savings gone - I gave up on the idea.
Student nurses should all be paid a (liveable) wage while they train.

Im a first year mental health nurse on my first placement and im already thinking of leaving. Its been so shit. 3 hours of driving a day to a team that very clearly dont want me there. Ive done nothing in 7 weeks. Not ticked off a single proficiency. My hair is literally falling out through stress. Ive had to quit my job because they never got back to me about negotiating hours so that’s added financial stress on my husband. We have 2 kids. Can’t even submit my mileage claim ad the placement forgot I was coming so never got an assessor in so there was no one to sign off my timesheets. On top of that ive had assessments and exams during the placement. Was supposed to find out my next placement last Monday but still haven’t heard anything.

No way could I train to be a nurse. I’d have to give up my job, get into debt to train , as wouldn’t be eligible for another student loan. Getting a job around training to still contribute to mortgage bills etc wouldn’t be possible - I’d never see my partner or children! The hours are too long and unsociable, the moneys not worth it even with the enhancements. The strikes of late show moral is on the floor. Kudos to people who do it but I couldn’t.

@Booooot has the team even learnt your name yet? Normally you're "Student" or "the student" to 95% of the staff for 100% of the time.

Absolutely.
Funnily enough I find that some nurses who climb the ladder quickly are not necessarily the best nurses, not even particularly good at management, just extremely loud, confident and opinionated, keen to look good and charm the right people.
I was a band 6 for 5 years in crit care. Good at my job according to my managers, approachable and respected for my knowledge but too bloody nice for my own good, I really couldn't stand the back biting and bitchiness, the cliques, the arse licking and above all, the bone laziness of some staff.

I trained to be a nurse many years ago (first P2K intake) so it was a bit of a strange period between the transition from hospital based training to university education. We had a bursary and cheap hospital accommodation- I hated every minute then and left a few years after qualifying - even then I was on top band E (shows how long ago it was). I have several friends who are still nurses and my late husband was a highly skilled nurse and his banding would just not exist now! Also, at the time I was training and working, most wards still worked on an early/late shift pattern. A+E was the only department to work long days- the ward manager was very honest in that this cuts down staffing requirements considerably overall. It can be absolutely brutal for those doing it - without factoring child care etc.

I have been a frontline social worker now for far too many years. The issues regarding placements are largely the same as seem to be the experiences here. When I made the move to social work, admission to a course was really hard. Most required you to be over 25, have ober 100 hours of relative experience and also the interviews were tough (all alongside the academic requirements). Intakes on each course were around 30 people with a third expected to drop out.

Over the years, since universities have become responsible for recruitment and training, I have seen intakes grow substantially. There are not enough quality placements and good practice educators to meet demand (and do not get me started on lecturers who have had minimal experience- often decades ago). I have several family members and friends who work in HE- all would describe it as a business and that most undergraduates get very poor value for money. As a result, people are entering the profession ill prepared, unsupported and in considerable debt with very low wages. So people leave very quickly. Both nursing and social work are very rewarding careers, however retention is dire. Newly qualified workers are basically cannon fodder- and both professions are in crisis.

Fair enough. DGH's often didn't train nurses in my day either. Nurses should train in a teaching hospital. Training smaller numbers, offering a better experience and having a lower drop out rate would be a better system all round. Reading some of the experiences of students on this thread is shocking. Making beds and getting no teaching isn't training.

You can claim travel expenses if the miles to your placement are more than your university; for example, if your uni is 10 miles from your home and placement is 50, you can claim for 40 miles each way.

Alternatively, you can also claim back for accommodation, although the cap was about £50-55 a night when I last did it. You claim back through the NHS learning support fund; the form is on there. You need an account but would have created one when you applied for the nursing training bursary.

The only negative is you cannot claim any of these expenses until the end of the placement, so if you are paying for accommodation, you have to fund it yourself initially.

I booked accommodation because my placements were 54 miles away. It was an hour's journey each way and my shifts were 7 am to 9.30 pm. It was horrendous and so tiring.

Student nurses are never going to get an on call bed; completely unrealistic expectation. (I am a nurse).

OP, I feel for you. I totally agree. It is shit. I will be resigning soon.

There will be a university complaints procedure. I would put a complaint in. It will be no detriment to you. Sounds like they have lost paperwork and fucked up. Call them out on it.

This is such good advice. I so wish more companies followed it; and definitely the NHS should learn from it.

It isn’t about’ treat them mean’. There’s a lot of evidence that training at different trusts makes you a better practitioner overall with a more rounded knowledge, and avoids habits developing “because we’ve always done it this way” hence the need to travel. I sympathise with OP but it’s part of the training which she would have been informed of at the offset and agreed to, then she can do what she wants post qualification. Just keep your head down, avoid making arrogant comments about placements being too slow for you and work hard. It’s worth it in the end when the world is your oyster.

OP, not taking away from your experience, but adding perspective.

I'm in a different profession and also had to train for years, alongside practical experience and then CPD. I remember the training time being exhausting, commuting for hours, prepping to assignments, working my job, I didn't have a single day off for 2 years. I didn't drive at the time and commute to university and also to work was 1.5hrs each way. Then getting necessary placements was incredibly competitive and stressful. Looking back, it was horrendous, but so worth it.

You've got this. There are many of us who go through several years of hardship before qualifying, this happens in many different professions. We often get far less flexibility than you will have after qualification too in private sector. The future will be brighter soon xx

The head of one theatre I was on placement in, refused to learn my name. She referred to me as "child". I was in my mid 30s.