Bursaries are vital for the future of nursing | Anonymous

As a nurse in accident and emergency I’m the first person you’ll see. I’ll triage you, order your bloods and x-rays, interpret results, get you painkillers, take your blood pressure and pulse and escalate any issues to senior staff. If I suspect or you disclose abuse, I report this. If you are not looking after your health I’ll help you realise this. I put on your plaster cast, change your dressings, suture your cuts and take you to the toilet.

Before I trained to be a nurse I worked for four years as a parliamentary researcher after graduating with a degree in international relations. My calling, as such, hit me after the result of the 2010 election. I felt it was time to do something practical with my life and not sit in an office telling other people what they should be doing.

I couldn’t have trained as a nurse if it wasn’t for the bursary – it’s vital to those who cannot fund themselves

My course attracted a fabulously diverse group of people: artists, teachers, a child psychologist, full-time mothers, and several biomedical scientists. We had all given up other jobs to be there and were able to because the course had a £6,000 a year NHS bursary attached to it. Since qualifying in 2013 I suspect we have all repaid our debt to society a thousand times over.

I love the privilege of nursing and working in the emergency department of a major trauma hospital in London suits me; it’s fast paced, chaotic, entertaining and no minute is ever the same. My colleagues are dedicated, vibrant, intelligent and driven but a day at work is often exhausting.

We start already stretched to capacity. Several hours are spent moving patients through to beds elsewhere in the hospital or to other hospitals if we have no chance of creating more space where we are. This is a priority before the mid-morning build-up starts. From lunchtime things really begin to kick off – we can have 15 ambulances arrive in a matter of minutes. As the ambulance triage nurse it can be breathtakingly stressful trying to filter the emergencies out. Sometimes you can have five or six patients all deserving of a bed in the resuscitation area and no space to put them. The rest of my time is spent apologising to everyone else. I hear myself saying again and again: “It may be several hours before the doctor sees you, but we’ll make sure you have all the tests done in the meantime.”

We leave patients in corridors or on chairs who should really be in beds and in rooms. I’ve had women miscarrying in the waiting room and store rooms because there’s no trolley for them anywhere else. It’s hard to remember the joy in nursing when this happens so regularly. I hate that I leave people waiting in pain. It goes against my every instinct as a nurse but sadly sometimes we have to because there’s so many competing demands.

As a major trauma centre staff are regularly confronted with horrific injuries and accidents and rarely have time to digest these personally. Frustratingly these patients can often be drunk and abusive or have acute mental health problems that are hard to manage on top of their injuries. I’ve got scars on my arms where a patient has taken a chunk out of my skin. Another time, a patient swung a punch at me and when I ducked he smashed the window behind my head. There’s not much I have on my side but a clear head and agility.

I couldn’t have trained as a nurse if it wasn’t for the bursary – it’s vital to those who cannot fund themselves. I still had to borrow money off my parents and work part-time as it didn’t even cover my rent. The soul-grindingly hard work you experience as a student nurse sets you up well for your career. Yes, nursing is a vocation and a job you would be foolish to undertake for financial reward, but we do what we can to keep the NHS afloat.

Bursaries are vital for the future of nursing | Anonymous

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