Therese Coffey 'Nurses can leave if they want to'

[queeniegee]

I for one as a nurse will be voting for industrial action. Therese Coffey 'we will just get nurses from abroad if our nurses choose to leave' beggars belief and shows her utter contempt for nurses AND patients reflecting this government's stance on the general population of this country. They are the nastiest party I remember in living memory. Any nurses out there? What's the consensus?

Something isn’t right that you dodged student loans for so long l agree. I have paid back student loans for years, even when l had just graduated

It’s not a “choice” at most places to do long days (12-14 hour shifts). It’s just the shift pattern! You can put in a flexible working request but it may well not get approved. They are under no obligation to agree them, it depends on the needs of the service. Because they will struggle to fill the other 4-6 hours of the shift and it will leave your colleagues under more pressure when you leave the shift

Healthcare loves long days as it’s cheaper in effect as you aren’t paying stay for
It came from management at most places l have worked, rather than the staff

Sorry lost a bit of text from 3rd paragraph; you aren’t paying for 3 lots of hand overs: early shift to late shift and late shift to night shift

I work alongside nurses as an AHP and have seen the challenges working with and trying to train up overseas nurses. They're all lovely and work is a horrible situations leaving their families behind. But they often have no knowledge of uk medicine / guidelines / clinical areas that to me are bread and butter but are ignored / not developed in their home countries. English is often dreadful with limited understanding of what I'm saying and I see life threatening mistakes are being made on a daily basis. They are being put in a dreadful position.

I didn’t clap for tbe ‘nurses’ on a Thursday evening. We clapped for tbe key workers - the supermarket workers, tbe truck drivers, the fruit pickers, the refuse collection men - many of whom can only dream of achieving the salaries and professional recognition of nurses.

I just don’t ‘get’ tbe public sector and their unionised expectations of pay rises. Here in the private sector I’m in, we haven’t had a par rise for ten years…

This vocation thing gets right on my tits. As if the warm cosy feels pay the rent and feeds your family. Newsflash, it doesn’t. This is why nurses are and should be pushing to be seen, respected and paid as professionals, rather than Sainted Florence Nightingale types in it just for the love of it. Yes, most nurses care and have compassion for their patients but it is a professional job. Our medical and AHP colleagues don’t seem to have this problem to such a degree. People seem to accept it that Dr’s are professionals and AHP’s seem to the invisible workforce (good and bad, I expect!). The Dr’s/nurses thing probably has its roots in sexism, Dr traditionally = man, nurse traditionally = woman and so of course Dr is the paid professional and nurse is doing it out of the goodness of her heart.

Also - how ethical is it to poach trained nurses from developing third world countries - those countries need their nurses. It's not like they can just turn to other countries to recruit - no one would be queuing up. It does smack of colonialism

We can't easily recruit in primary, no surprise given the c33% pay cut from 2010-2020 and now factor in additional erosion from recent inflation, all while a £2.5tn gain in wealth to the richest during 'austerity'. No uplift to practice income to fund pay rises now easily either. Overseas recruits have at best a long adjustment period given the different way healthcare systems work and many are eventually great but many unable to work autonomously. A free market believer might want to understand the market signals from many people leaving the profession being a signal to perhaps raise wages... Don't expect this will be the last genius insight by the new SoS.

I’m fairly sure that a lot of British trained doctors and nurses have been ‘poached’ by Australia and other countries. Perhaps they could come back and help.

I've been a dual registered nurse/podiatrist for 41 years. I certainly will not be striking. When I took on this job it was knowing the salary would not be massive but I wanted to do the best that I could for patients.
I'm good with money and have made the best of it. I have my own home and brought up my son alone. I've done private bank work on the side to make up for skint times and you can earn a lot of money that way.

They'll find nurses, believe me. I'm from Eastern Europe, where typical nurse earns around 15 000€\year (with University degree and night shifts). All young nurses are more than happy to move to other countries (I have family members working in Germany, Sweden, etc. But their requirements are much bigger than UK).
Quality of nursing is another question.

Named changed as could be very outing!

I used to be a nurse, and left it to become a doctor. This week when in a meeting about our massive waiting lists and the fact that we can't get approval for more consultants despite desperately needing them, one of my colleagues asked if I went back in time, would I have remained a nurse.

Fuck no. I'll take my £100k student debt and working in the same broken NHS over what nurses have to work through. It's absolutely appalling and we've lost the whole middle years of nurses where I am, so we have the lifers who are women in their 50-60s usually, and then they've next to no nurses in their 30s-40s as they've all left, so wards are being run with a load of inexperienced nurses, adding to everyone's stress.

Wonder if the red top press got whiplash from the 'NHS heroes' to the 'can't afford a payrise, lucky to have a job, the grasping @£$%s'.

I am not a nurse but totally agree.

I was talking to a teacher recently who had painted her classroom over the summer herself, and had bought pencils, glue etc out of her own money.

Wow 😮 what a comment and of course it will be because English Nurses are lazy . Then they will work the foreign nurses to the ground then get more in because we are lazy English.

I tend to think the answer to the nursing crisis isn't particularly paying nurses more, but rather having more nurses doing less work each. Because if you have a nurse looking after 15 people, the job is surely unbearably stressful because you can't do it well. Whereas if you looked after 5 people, your job would be the rewarding and fulfilling job it should be?

Obviously that's a very circular issue though, because to do that you'd have needed to start training more nurses 5+ years ago, and I don't know how you make conditions better in the short term while people are leaving and there's such a massive backlog.

I have to say, I do think it's disingenuous to say there is a starting salary of £27k, without noting that on top of that there is a pension worth about another £7-8k per year, plus top ups for anti-social hours (which I do agree with, as the hours are anti-social, but they are also pretty clearly part of the deal when you decide to become a nurse, so should really be included when you calculate what nurses get paid). And actually I think not being clear about the good parts dilutes the message, because people read it, know things like "but nurses get good pensions" and don't see the really key points like the fact that current nursing levels mean ratios are unsafe and that that makes the job so stressful that nurses end up leaving.

If we don't fund healthcare and education properly we aren't going to get growth, that Truss is so keen on, because kids won't know anything and we'll all be in I'll health. It's such a basic misunderstanding of how society works.

I would support all our nurses and teachers in a fight to remedy this. The tories have seriously lost the plot.

interesting that lots of market signals like doctors and nurses fully leaving the professions in their 20s/30s and entire practices handing back their contracts. Haven't seen the like/scale before the last round of government management genius. Doesn't stop fairytale adding to the workload with promises like f2f or menopause reviews without the staff and resources. I wonder how the interviewers don't laugh out loud at the condensed genius being asserted.

Teaching is in a mess too, I totally agree. The degradation of the public sector isn’t just a nursing issue.

This ☝️

You can only claim tax relief on this amount, not the £120!

I'm not sure whether people are aware on this thread that nursing IS different to other jobs. They literally save lives. They should be paid comparable to the risk they take on.

I do wonder at people on these sorts of threads who bang on about "nurses think they're so special". Are you paid government shills, or just lacking in sense/empathy?

If people want to be concerned, they might want to think what an excellent job the new Chancellor did when SoS of Health. A less bad job as Chair of the Health select committee but even so.

To be fair to Coffey, she had as good a handle when SoS of DWP - what courageously incorrect and misleading statements and decisions did she make there?

It's staggering .. I agree