NHS Bursary

Fiona Mactaggart Excerpts

Monday 11th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Maria Caulfield]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. Those routes sounds like the state-enrolled nurse or state-registered nurse route again, and they worked pretty well in years gone by.

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Maria Caulfield]

I have almost finished, so I will not take any more interventions. The Minister told me that those routes are alternatives to the proposals that have been put forward today. I urge him to highlight those alternative routes and to give a timescale. If those alternatives are realistic, they need to be in place as the bursary system is phased out, if not before, so that student nurses have choices on how they become nurses. When I was running a clinical team, we used the assistant practitioner role effectively and made some great progress. Some of those assistant practitioners are in the process of becoming qualified nurses themselves.

I have a couple more points to make. One thing that we are missing is a return-to-nursing scheme. Under the proposals, money will be saved from the bursary scheme. Huge numbers of nurses go off to have children or take a break from their career, like me, and they have to do a six-month course and pay for that themselves. An efficient way of building up nursing numbers quite quickly would be to fund return-to-nursing courses, so that we can easily and quickly increase the number of nurses who can get back into the profession. They have huge amounts of experience.

It is hard to be a student nurse. Although it was a long time ago, I still bear the scars of my nurse training. Not only do student nurses have to learn and take exams, but their placement changes every eight to 12 weeks. They go to a new ward, new day unit or new community placement, and they never really feel part of any team. As soon as they start to get that feeling, they are moving on to the next team. They are struggling to survive on less than £4,000 a year and have to rely on family and friends. We are now asking student nurses to take on more debt to do their training. They may or may not come to nursing with a lot of life experience, but they are telling people that either they may die or their loved ones are dying. Student nurses witness death at first hand—sometimes that death is expected and sometimes it is not. They are kept going, however, by the thought that one day they will be a qualified nurse with that bit of paper that says, “You are registered.”

We have an extremely high turnover of student nurses. Many are leaving before they are qualified, and my concern is that, if we add to their financial pressures, the turnover will be even higher. We are spending nearly £12,000 a nurse to recruit from overseas and fill our vacancies, and I would prefer to see that money being used to sponsor nurses to get into their nurse training, whether that is through the associate route, the apprenticeship route, which sounds exciting, or through encouraging and paying nurses to come back into nursing. We need to have that Virgin philosophy, where a student nurse is part of the team from day one. I hope the Minister can give us some positive feedback from the petition.