Why would nurses choose to work in London?
Edmund Stubbs, 7 January 2016
Unlike for other professions, where there are far more employment opportunities in London than elsewhere, nurses are almost always in demand regardless of geographical location as people get ill every day across the country. So why choose to work in London if vacancies exist nationwide and living costs in the capital remain astronomical?
According to the Royal College of Nursing there were 10,000 unfilled vacancies in London in 2015, largely due to limits on nurse training places and the unrealistic wages nurses are paid London (an average of £24,570) in, the most expensive place to live in the UK.
The government’s change to student funding, ending bursaries for nursing and other allied health professional training has, the government claims, made it possible to create 10,000 additional training places by 2020. The government argues the former funding mechanism could only offer nurse education to an insufficient number of students.
However, we now see that nurses are being discouraged from working in the capital due to high living costs that will probably be made more daunting by the prospect of having to the repay the larger student loans that will replace bursaries. This is a disincentive to nursing training in the first place, and especially so in London.
Two days before the government announced its intention to remove nursing training bursaries, Civitas published a report acknowledging that to train more nurses, the government could not reasonably expected to pay up front bursaries for more nursing staff. However, the Civitas report recognised that it was unjust to remove all training funding for nurses, who have endured pay freezes and cooperated in stringent efficiency drives for many years. Such a move might prove counterproductive both for recruitment and the retention of a home-grown nursing workforce.
Instead, Civitas proposed that nurse training could be financed through student loans but that the NHS pays back the portion of this loan equivalent to the amount of the bursary trainees would have received in the past, but only if nurses continued to work for the NHS during the loan repayment period.
Civitas’ proposal would encourage new recruits into the profession without leaving them out of pocket, while enabling the NHS to protect its investment in staff training. Under the suggested scheme. If nurses were to leave the NHS to work abroad or choose to be employed in the private sector, they would remain within their rights to do so, but would become responsible for their own student loan repayments. The NHS (and the British taxpayer) would not in these cases be paying for overseas and private nursing training, as is presently the case.
To reduce the 17 per cent shortage of London nurses to at least the national shortfall average of 10 per cent, the government must increase the numbers of nurses it trains but also offer them incentives to work in the capital. Repayment of nurse student loans, possibly even at a more rapid rate in London than elsewhere in the country, could give nursing in London the pull factor it needs.