Nursing: Higher Education Investment Debate
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Nick Thomas-Symonds
Main Page: Nick Thomas-Symonds (Labour - Torfaen)Department Debates - View all Nick Thomas-Symonds's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
Nursing: Higher Education Investment
Nick Thomas-Symonds Excerpts(6 years ago)
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Eleanor Smith
I do agree, and my hon. Friend will hear me refer in my speech to what he has just said.
Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate, and I commend what my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) said about the proposition that we need to pay our nurses properly to value them truly. Does my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South West agree that it is important that we have specialisms too, and that one specialism we require more of across the country is Parkinson’s nurses?
Eleanor Smith
Absolutely. That is where nursing is important. Nurses are becoming specialists in Parkinson’s, Turner syndrome and sickle cell, all of which are specialisms that will be required in the future of nursing.
Nurses are working in cutting-edge research on ethics, safety, improvements to care and new ways of working. They are leading from the frontline, and as professionals they should be at the heart of strategic policy making. Nursing is at a critical junction in our healthcare and systems, yet the Government are without an independent chief nursing officer after the removal of that critical leadership post from the heart of the Department of Health and Social Care. That is an insult to the nursing profession.
How many of my right hon. and hon. Friends are regularly contacted by their constituents about health and social care issues—people struggling, writing about services being reduced or cut, unable to access support without help? Increasingly, that is happening because there are not enough staff to run things safely. Across the country, nurses are clear that staffing for safe and effective care is their most important priority and their biggest worry.