Nursing degree applications slump after NHS bursaries abolished

Applications by students in England to nursing and midwifery courses at British universities have fallen by 23% after the government abolished NHS bursaries, figures show.

Nursing leaders said the sudden slump revealed by the latest university application data was inevitable given that student nurses now faced paying annual tuition fees of more than £9,000.

“These figures confirm our worst fears. The nursing workforce is in crisis and if fewer nurses graduate in 2020 it will exacerbate what is already an unsustainable situation,” said Janet Davies, the general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing.

“The outlook is bleak: fewer EU nurses are coming to work in the UK following the Brexit vote, and by 2020 nearly half the workforce will be eligible for retirement. With 24,000 nursing vacancies in the UK, the government needs to take immediate action to encourage more applicants by reinstating student funding and investing in student education. The future of nursing, and the NHS, is in jeopardy.”

Universities dismissed talk of a crisis, arguing that undergraduate numbers across other courses fell in 2012 when tuition fees rose to £9,000 a year but later recovered.

“Our members report receiving a high number of good quality applications for most courses and they will continue to recruit through to the summer,” said Prof Jessica Corner, chair of the Council of Deans of Health.

“Where courses have historically had a large number of applicants, fewer applicants might well not affect eventual student numbers.”

Prof Steve West, the chair of Universities UK’s health education policy network, said most universities had anticipated “a dip” in applications but called for the government to promote nursing degrees.

The drop in nursing applications was part of an overall fall in applications to start undergraduates courses in Britain this year, according to figures from Ucas, the university admissions clearing house.

The number of domestic applicants dropped by 5%, the biggest fall in recent years, and there was a 7% fall in applications from the EU, as reported by the Guardian last week.

Applications from British-based 18-year-olds in their last year of school remained flat but there were steep falls in applications from people in their 20s. Combined with the lower level of EU applications since Brexit, it means 30,000 fewer applications overall, down from nearly 600,000 by the January application point last year.

The EU numbers were especially troubling after four years of 5%-7% growth in applications.

Applications from Ireland were down by 18%, although Mark Corver, Ucas’s director of analysis, cautioned that individual countries showed wide swings, with applications from Portugal up by 15%.

Last week Michael Arthur, the provost of University College London, said the national fall in applications was unevenly distributed. “The respective numbers for UCL are quite different. We are up in UK by 5%, we are down in EU by just 0.8%, and we are up in overseas by 6.9%. So you begin to see the large variations that there will be across the country,” Arthur told MPs.

UCL’s experience has been replicated across institutions that demand higher A-level results for entry, including members of the Russell Group of research-intensive universities.

But lower tariff universities, which admit students with Cs and Ds in A-levels and equivalent qualifications, have seen a 10% fall in applications.

Prof John Latham, vice-chancellor of Coventry University, which has more than 2,000 EU students, said: “The falls from UK and EU students suggest that universities may need to go more global, more quickly, but each is now going to have to look at its model. I am sure some will reduce in size and scale while others may increase their share.”

Nick Hillman, head of the Higher Education Policy Institute, said application numbers would improve when the current decline in the numbers of 18-year-olds in the population was reversed over the next decade.

“The woefully low entry rates among some groups, such as poor white working class males, also suggest there is plenty of room for improvement,” Hillman said.

Nursing degree applications slump after NHS bursaries abolished

Must Mammography Be Abolished?

Does the advantage of mammography outweigh the harm?

Mammography for the early detection of breast cancer has prolonged been advisable by this kind of organizations as the American Cancer Society American Cancer Society, the United States Preventive Solutions Task Force, the American University of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Healthcare Association, and the Nationwide Cancer Institute. Approximately 37 million mammograms are carried out every single year in the United States.

For decades there have been pointed controversies more than the age at which screening need to be initiated and the frequency (each and every year, each two many years). And the far more basic query pertains to the aim positive aspects of mammography – that is, how several lives are truly saved due to detecting probably fatal breast cancers at an earlier stage.

In spite of these controversies, the worth of mammography screening has been an article of faith in the health-related community, amongst American ladies, and amid breast cancer advocates.

English: Girl undergoing a mammogram of the proper breast (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Nonetheless, in current many years, in addition to the long-standing inquiries about the actual advantages, the harm induced by screening has been obtaining growing focus. The harm stems from the truth that as a lot of as 30% of mammogram outcomes might be “false positives.” Very first, biopsies are carried out on suspicious-hunting entities on the X-ray that turn out to be benign, and, second, some women undergo treatment (surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy) for cancers that are indolent and would in no way have threatened their life. This is referred to as “over-therapy.”

As a end result of new scientific studies exhibiting smaller sized rewards than had been claimed in the previous and, particularly, the new consideration to the adverse results of mammography, the use of mammography is getting questioned in a radically new way.

This week’s New England Journal of Medication carries a Viewpoint report from Switzerland entitled “Abolishing Mammography Screening System? A View from the Swiss Healthcare Board.”

The authors, Nikola Biller-Adorno, a healthcare ethicist, and Peter Jűni, a clinical epidemiologist, had been element of an skilled panel convened by the Swiss Academy of Healthcare Sciences to overview the proof with regards to mammography screening.

They make three principal factors:

• Initial, clinical trials of mammography screening date from an earlier time period. In the past 25 years breast cancer therapy has improved substantially, even for women with innovative disease, and the death fee from breast cancer has been lowered by 27 % among 1990 and 2005.

The authors inquire: “Could the modest benefit of mammography screening in terms of breast-cancer mortality that was proven in trials initiated among 1963 and 1991 still be detected in a trial performed these days?”

• Second, they emphasize the emerging evidence that the harms of mammography outweigh the positive aspects. A current publication based mostly on extended comply with-up of the Cancer Nationwide Breast Screening Examine signifies that 22 percent (106 out of 484) of screen-detected cancers were over-diagnosed. “This means that 106 of the 44,925 healthier girls in the screening group had been diagnosed with and treated for breast cancer unnecessarily, which resulted in needless surgical interventions, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, or some mixture of these therapies.”

On the query of whether or not there is a advantage from mammography, a Cochrane review of 10 trials involving far more than 600,000 women showed no evidence that mammography screening diminished all round mortality.

• Last but not least, the authors level to the wide gulf separating women’s perceptions of the positive aspects of mammography and goal assessments of its real results.

In a survey of women’s perceptions about mammography, 72 percent of women said they believed that mammography diminished the odds of dying of breast cancer by at least half, and 72 percent also considered that at least 80 deaths would be prevented per one,000 females screened.

Must Mammography Be Abolished?