A long-awaited five-year plan for the nursing workforce in Wales has been revealed by senior nurses, with the aim of growing, transforming and supporting the profession.
Health Education and Improvement Wales (HEIW) today published its Strategic Nursing Workforce Plan for 2025-2030.
“The demand for nurses is increasing, and supply must keep at pace”
Rebecca Boore
This plan sets out the main measures the health service in Wales aims to take in order to address workforce pressures in the devolved nation.
It was formally launched at the HEIW Nursing Workforce Conference, held at Llandrindod Wells, by Rebecca Boore, one of the authors of the plan and associate director of workforce transformation (nursing and midwifery).
HEIW has organised the 32-point plan into three sections: growing, transforming and supporting the workforce.
It claimed that the measures in the plan would increase the “capacity” and “capability” of the nursing workforce, drive better job satisfaction and have other benefits for nurses and midwives across Wales.
Under “growing”, the plan stated that HEIW would “target nurse retention activities” for early and late-career nurses in order to reduce the turnover rate of staff.
Further actions in this section included improving attraction campaigns to drive more people to apply for nursing courses.
It comes as Cardiff University, one of the biggest providers in the country, is considering scrapping all of its nursing degree offerings.
The plan also outlined, for the first time since January 2024, information on the creation of a band 4 nursing associate role in Wales, in the wake of its rollout in England.
One action in the plan was to implement the registered nursing associate role within the nursing workforce within the next five years, with more information on the scope of this role to be given later this year via work done by the chief nursing officer (CNO) for Wales.
HEIW has also set out aims for expanding student placement opportunities for sectors including primary and community care, and the development of a “competency framework” to prepare them for progression from band 5 to 6.
In addition, in the second section of the plan, “transforming the workforce”, HEIW outlined a number of measures to implement technology into nursing practice.
Rebecca Boore
This included reviewing and scaling up successful local innovation projects, creating a toolkit for implementing genomics into nursing practice and supporting “innovative models of care delivery”, such as virtual nurse roles.
As well as this, the plan listed actions HEIW, health boards and the Welsh Government would look to take to improve prescribing and advanced practice pathways for nurses.
The third and final section is centred around supporting the nursing and midwifery workforce.
This included an intention by HEIW to help health boards improve succession planning for nurse executive leader roles, improve the diversity of nurse leaders and to develop training programmes for nursing staff in leadership positions.
It stated that HEIW would help develop continued professional development (CPD) for nurses and promote wellbeing resources for the workforce.
Speaking at the launch of the plan, Ms Boore said it marked a “significant step forward” towards ensuring a “sustainable, skilled and supported nursing workforce”.
She outlined the key issues that the plan aimed to address: an ageing population, growing complexity of care and a need to improve preventative and public healthcare.
“We also know there are workforce pressures, with challenges in recruitment and retention requiring new workforce models and career pathways to ensure long term sustainability,” she said.
“The demand for nurses is increasing, and supply must keep at pace,” she added.
Ms Boore said the plan represented a commitment by HEIW to grow, transform and support the nursing workforce across the next five years.
She added: “The nursing workforce has a critical role in leading the NHS into a future of more accessible, efficient and high-quality care.”
At the end of her presentation, Ms Boore said: “Implementation of the plan will bring benefits, not just for the people of Wales, but for the nursing workforce and employing organisations.
“We’ve spent quite a long time identifying what those key benefits, and the metrics, are to enable us to measure them,” she said.
“This is not just a plan, it’s a roadmap for the future of nursing in Wales, and our success depends on us working together.”
Also at the conference were nursing and midwifery representatives from across NHS Wales, the government and the country’s health boards.
Gillian Knight, nursing officer at the office of the CNO for Wales, gave an update to the conference on the work her team has been doing to develop nursing in the devolved nation.
This included the upcoming implementation of the registered nursing associate role, which she affirmed would not be a replacement for registered nursing.
