Nursing: Higher Education Investment

Karen Lee Excerpts

Wednesday 21st November 2018 Westminster Hall

[Eleanor Smith]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, but unfortunately, as someone who has worked on the wards, I have to say that we do not see it; it does not feel like that.

Simply put, there is no long-term plan without a registered nursing workforce. Whatever ambition the Secretary of State and Simon Stevens have must be matched by credible growth in the number of registered nurses.

[Karen Lee (Lincoln) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Eleanor Smith]

Yes.

[Karen Lee]

Does my hon. Friend—

[Philip Davies (in the Chair)]

Order. It is not for me to rule on whether people should or should not give way, but I should say that it is not really on for people just to wander into the Chamber and seek to intervene within two minutes of doing so. I say that gently, but it is not for me to decide who should be given way to; that is a matter for the speaker.

[Karen Lee]

Sorry, I have been at another meeting.

[Philip Davies (in the Chair)]

That is not the point, if I may say so to the hon. Lady. Would the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Eleanor Smith) like to give way?

[Eleanor Smith]

I will take this intervention and then I would like to make some progress.

[Karen Lee]

I will be brief. There was mention of how many nurses there were on the wards. I was a nurse on a ward, and I am getting older. The drop by one third in the number of applications means that, even with the new nurses, we do not have the number of people to fill the vacancies. The Prime Minister makes great play of how much money there will be for all these nursing vacancies. If nurses are not trained and people are retiring and those places are not being filled by new nurses, how do we do it?

[Eleanor Smith]

I will address that in my speech. I thank my hon. Friend very much for that intervention.

I welcome the public commitment made by the Secretary of State at the Royal College of Nursing on 31 October to invest in growing the number of nurses through higher education, including through the long-term plan, because I feel that finally someone is paying attention. The Secretary of State has said that he will look into the possibility of introducing safe nurse staffing legislation. He has said that he will explore anything that might help to address the problem we face. I sincerely hope that the Secretary of State means it, because he and Simon Stevens have the power to fix this mess with proper funding and intervention.

That brings me to the crux of the debate. We have to grow our nursing workforce, so the only question that we need to answer is this: how do we fund what we know is the fastest and safest way to do that at scale, in the light of our crisis? Higher education is the best and most cost-effective way to ensure that we have the right number of registered nursing staff, with the right skills and experience, which patients need and deserve. New routes into nursing, which are welcome if done right, still cannot educate anywhere near enough nurses to an appropriate skill level to meet the current need, let alone the future one. It is time to fix the supply pipeline and for the Secretary of State and Simon Stevens to stand up and be counted.

In 2016, the Government removed the NHS bursary and replaced it with a student loan. The £1.2 billion that was taken out of healthcare higher education was framed as a saving, but where did it go? What did it save? Was it used to grow the number of nurses? The stated purpose of the Government’s reform was to increase the number of nursing students. It is against that goal that the impact of the Government’s reforms must be judged.

Let me bust a few myths. I expect the Minister to say, “The old bursary model placed an artificial cap on the number of nurse training places that universities could offer students.” That is factually untrue. Funding of nursing student numbers has always been a political choice. It has always been up to the Government to choose what they want to fund. I expect the Minister to say, “The loan model has not made it less attractive to apply.” In each year since the reform, applications to nursing courses have fallen. In September 2018, nearly 1,800 fewer nurses were due to start at university, compared with September 2016.

--- Later in debate ---

[Karen Lee (Lincoln) (Lab)]

I was a mature student aged 41 when I started my nurse training, and I was a single parent. I could not have completed my training without a bursary, and could not have done a part-time job because it was a full-time course and I had a child to care for. My younger single friends also needed their bursaries, because everyone had bills to pay. I was a nurse for 14 years and my colleagues are still nurses. None of us could have trained without the bursaries, and none of my friends would have gone on to be nurses as they are to this very day.

There are currently 41,000 nursing vacancies in NHS England. For the second year in a row, more nurses are leaving the profession than joining it, and one in three is expected to retire in the next 10 years. The NHS has spent £527 million plugging staffing gaps with expensive agency staff. I do not know how that makes any kind of economic sense. Added to that, the reality is that patient safety is compromised. Agency staff are not experts in their field. I have been in an arrest situation in which, out of seven trained, only three were regular nurses. It compromises patient safety. In addition, the number of European nurses registered in Britain dropped by 87% compared with 2016-17 figures. That means that there will be even fewer nurses.

The Government must stop putting lives at risk by understaffing and underfunding the NHS. People just are not signing up to be apprentice nurses. It sounds all right in theory, but does not work in practice. There is not the take-up. If we genuinely aim to train sufficient nurses the Government must join the Labour party in committing to reinstate nursing bursaries. Until that happens, no matter how many nursing jobs the Government fund, as nurses of my generation retire and numbers of the newly trained gradually decrease, we will simply not have the trained nurses to fill the places.