Shortage Of Nurses?

[Le Chat]

My local paper reports that the NHS hospital in my area (Southport) have recruited a load of nurses from Portugal, as there is a shortage in this country.
This is the first I've heard of it. We're not talking midwives or specialist nurses here either.
So...is there a shortage of RGN nurses and if so how????

[Peter Pedant]

.

Conditions are crap and they dont wanna work there.

Funnily enough the employer (NHS) is slow to realise this usually.


David Dalton's Hope Hospital in Manc scores high in everything - place to work, patients like it, low infection and re-admission rate

and other hospitals come and look at what he is doing and go back and make reports to home base - and are invariably told - we can't do it like that.....

[Sqad]

Perhaps some ABer nurses can throw some light on this......Southport and Ormskirk is quite a desirable area.......I would have thought.

[mikey4444]

I know very little about the issue of nursing shortages in the NHS but surely foreign-born Nurses in our Hospitals is hardly something unusual or new ?

[Sqad]

mikey....it is in the Southport area.

[pixie373]

We've had a nursing shortage for a very long time, to the point where you get a bursary to encourage more people to train. I got one 12 years ago. I didn't complete the training due to hating the hospital i worked in and also the first few grades of nurses get paid less than i do as a carer.

[Eve]

I have to say when I spent a spell in Hope (or Salford Royal as it is now) Hospital some years ago and was incredibly impressed by the cleanliness, even people coming round checking it regularly on the ward.

It's a nicely set up hospital, a little canteen area with shops people can buy stuff in (useful as an inpatient), cash machines etc..

Instead of meals being ordered and delivered via Sodexo, like at Manchester Royal, they had the day room with tables in and you could go up and choose your meal from what was on offer at a serving hatch and sit at tables to eat with others if you wanted (and could).

[Old_Geezer]

One needs to pay a rate worthwhile in the country one is in. But also there seems to be a shift towards nursing being less of a comforting/caring role and needing more academic skills so it is probably difficult to match the needs. So leeching off other countries nursing skillbase is the short term fix. I don't see it being a real attempt to tackle the causes of the problem. But there again management moves on, all they have to do is look good for the CV short term.

[Le Chat]

I always thought this country had plentiful nurses. I had 2 friends who trained in Kingston in the 80's and there were hundreds training then.
It has definitely become more academic and maybe it is a bit of a shocker when the nitty gritty of ward life becomes a reality. However, it is a job where you can expand into other areas from, such as theatre nursing, doctor's surgery nurse, medical sales etc

[Eve]

Having had a number of stays in hospital they just seem so busy.

I remember a healthcare assistant commented, when asked, as to why she didn't go on to train as a nurse, she said because she wanted to be involved in patient care, not all the paperwork etc...like the nurses are.

I've been lucky in being relatively self sufficient but in one stay it took a long time after I advised them I'd had an accident for anything to be done, the first nurse did apologise and said she forgot as she had been so busy after I waited and had to ask someone else as well as badger for a towel and clean gown etc... so I could go get myself cleaned up then just sit by my bed and wait. Apparently I shouldn't have been on that ward because of that which was part of the reason I was admitted.

In the same stay it took 14 hours of me saying the cannula they had put in didn't feel right and them keeping on injecting stuff into it, causing a lot of pain, before someone actually listened (by which point I was about ready to yank it out myself) and realised it caused phlebitis and I had a burning arm like Popeye.

I feel so sorry for the people who are less able to help themselves.

I wonder if that puts people off nursing, the fact they are so busy that they aren't able to provide a high standard of nursing care or the fact it is now more academic with degrees and such puts of people who genuinely want to enter a caring profession.

[arwyn]

There's a shortage of Nurses on the wards but in out-patients they're tripping over each other while trying to look busy.

[bednobs]

personally i think it's because they have made it an all-degree profession

[sherrardk]

When himself as recently in hospital he noticed that the vast majority of the staff were agency staff. However,, when we visited the ward was crawling with nursing staff, in his ward of four patients there never seemed to be less than six staff.

[DaisyNonna]

Last year our local paper was highlighting the fact that many of our newly trained nurses could not find jobs. ???

[mikey4444]

Sqad...not sure if the location of the hospital is any way relevant to this story. I have been back and forth to a big teaching Hospital in Cardiff since the first week in February. No shortage of foreign nurses there, or doctors come to that. I'm still unsure why the recruitment of nurses from Portugal is news ? Is there a Hospital anywhere in Britain that doesn't employ non-British nursing staff ?

[boxtops]

Yes, there is a shortage of experienced registered nurses. One of our local Trusts is recruiting in the Philippines. The issue is also that the Trusts are being encouraged to save money by skill-mixing more, and skilling up healthcare assistants to do some of the tasks which you don't need a registered nurse to do.

The nursing student intakes are less in number too, because the NHS pays for their training (largely) and can't afford to fund as many thousands as they have in the past.

The current initiative is for more health visitors - hundreds more have been trained or are still in training, in the last couple of years.

[DaisyNonna]

More non-care in the community then?

[boxtops]

health visitors are in the community, daisy? - not everyone's in the Hospitals trusts, just as many nurses are in the community trusts.

[DaisyNonna]

What exactly is a health visitor qualified to do?
Was being ironic.
Health visitor assigned to my mother did just that. Visited.

[boxtops]

They're registered nurses, this is from the NHS Jobs website

It is a diverse, satisfying and challenging role that involves bonding with families over time.It suits nurses and midwives with an interest in health promotion, public health and working in the community.

Health visitors are best placed to help families and young children. In fact, a growing body of evidence underlines the importance of the role in the first few years of a person's life.

I'd have thought it more likely that a district nurse or community nurse visited your mother at home, I'm not sure why they'd have sent an HV!

[Scylax]

I'm all for nurses being better educated, but education comes AFTER training. Nursing is not an academic profession and does not require a university input. For umpteen years nurses were trained by hospitals as a form of apprenticeship, learning the job by 'standing next to Nellie', until, after 3 years you'd got the hang of it.

Later, an aspiring nurse could enroll on a degree course, studying a subject such as Psychology, Physiology or Bacteriology, etc., or even a general BA course to prove she was able to think at a higher level, but basically a nurse needs TRAINING, not academic education.

Consider; if you were flying from Heathrow to wherever you'd hope the pilot was expertly trained for his job, not 'educated but incompetent'.