Health and social care secretary Wes Streeting has today trailed a range of policies designed to appeal to student nurses and nursing educators, as the government prepares to publish its NHS plan.
Among other things, Mr Streeting promised improvements for students on being able to start work more quickly after finishing their degrees and on speeding up expense payments.
“We’ll cut red tape so student nurses can begin their job as soon as possible”
Wes Streeting
He also suggested there would be more student placements in community and primary care settings in future, plus more emphasis placed on digital technology in nursing education.
The Royal College of Nursing, however, dismissed the changes as “modest”, arguing that an overhaul of nurse education was needed including better financial support for students.
The college stopped short though of repeating calls for the reinstatement of bursaries for student nurses, which were scrapped a decade ago in 2015.
The health secretary flagged the moves in an opinion piece for The i Paper today ahead of the expected publication of the Department of Health and Social Care’s 10 Year Health Plan for England.
He said: “We all know that nurses haven’t had the working conditions they deserve for too long.
“That’s why in our 10-year health plan… we are making changes to boost their conditions, their training and their careers,” he said, adding: “Those changes will start for nurses as soon as they qualify.
“We’ll cut red tape so student nurses can begin their job as soon as possible, ending the ridiculous situation where thousands of students wait months after qualifying to get on the wards and start treating patients.
“From next year, student nurses will also be paid for their expenses faster,” he said.
“This means they won’t be waiting months to get reimbursed for things as simple as bus fare, a change that will stop training and work from making a dent in their pockets.
“We will also change their training, so it reflects a modern health service where care is delivered closer to your home, on your local high street, with thousands of extra student nurses every year getting valuable experience training in neighbourhood health as well as hospitals.”
He added: “We’ll also train them up on the latest tech, freeing up their time so they can treat more patients faster, and helping shift our NHS from analogue to digital.”
Speaking more generally about nursing, Mr Streeting also pledged that the government would act to improve nurse wellbeing and staff safety, in the wake of growing threats faced by health workers.
“We’ll work with employers and unions to boost standards so that staff have access to nutritious food and drink, and are better protected from violence, racism and sexual harassment,” he said.
In response, RCN general secretary and chief executive Professor Nicola Ranger said: “These modest changes may improve the experience for current nursing students but more is needed to boost student and nurse staffing levels in the face of the current crisis.
“The new measures are recognition that nurse education needs reform, but ministers need to go further,” warned the RCN leader.
“Even after today, students will still be unable to make ends meet during their studies due to shockingly low levels of financial support, whilst at the end of their course they face crushing debt, poor pay and an entire career weighted to the bottom of the NHS pay scale,” she added.
Ms Ranger noted that, if the government wanted to “solve the workforce crisis”, ministers needed to understand that they must boost the numbers of students joining courses in the first place.
“This won’t happen without overhauling nurse education, including stronger financial support for those who commit to working in the NHS and social care,” said Ms Ranger.
“They must also ensure there are jobs for all graduates to go into at a time when staffing levels are dangerously low across the health service,” she added.
Shortly after the 2024 general election the new Labour government announced its intention to develop a 10-year health plan for England.
Ministers have previously said that the plan will focus on delivering three big shifts in healthcare, namely from hospital to community, analogue to digital and sickness to prevention.
Earlier this week, the government announced that, as part of the plan, an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven “early warning” system would be rolled out across the NHS to improve patient safety.
In a statement, it claimed it would identify patient safety problems faster than the manual analysis of data on issues such as patterns of abuse, serious injuries, deaths and other incidents.
In contrast, it emerged over the weekend that ministers planned to close down a range of arms’-length bodies linked to patient safety, including the Health Services Safety Investigations Body.
