Nursing
students are exceptional. Their courses are complex, their training is tough,
and they spend significant time on clinical placement working all hours of the
day and night.
But England is now the only country in the UK without some form
of bursary for the nursing degree. This has crumbled the number of nursing
applications and fostered an environment that is utterly unfair to nursing
students and completely unsafe for patients.
Since the loss of the bursary, nursing
applications in England are down by a third – and falling fast. This at a time
when one in three nurses are due to retire within the decade and an alarming
number are leaving before retirement citing intolerable working conditions. And
that’s before the Brexit impact.
On behalf of all of the nurses and student
nurses who contacted her, Siobhain spoke out in Parliament. You can watch her speech here: