Nusing shortage

[wolf_shadow]

We talk about how to solve the nursing crisis. It seems straightforward. A lot of girls who want to do nursing are kept out because the entrance criteria for nursing, certainly down in London, are much the same as they are for university. We need to reduce the academic requirements and allow young people with practical skills back in.

Opinions?

From here.

Comments

[goth-twiglet.livejournal.com]

There is a differnece between acadamic qualifications and intelligence. I'm happy for intelligent would-be nurses of any gender (not just girls) to be inducted into the nursing profession via an access course of some kind to get their lacking education up to speed.

What we do not want to encourage is ignorant nurses who (whatever their first language) do not speak English properly (i have seen some horrible things happen because the nurse misunderstood what was being asked of them), and we certainly need to ensure that the nurse can understand what is written on charts etc. so that there are no medication or treatment accidents.

There always was a way into the profession for less educated would-be nurses, either as an auxiliary or via the the "enrolled nurse" status which was abolished so that all nurses are now state regisitered.
This leads to problems. There are always tasks that SRNs are going to feel are "beneath" them and which would, in the past,have been dealt with by SENs or auxilliaries, now it seems thay are often just not done, or are done badly by non-medical staff.

So it seems there are several problems; One of status within the profession, one of motivation and renumeration, and one of mobility "up the chain" (is there the opportunity to become a nurse practioner or matron?). Without solving these problems you are not going to attract the right sort of candidate into nursing, and attracting the "wrong" sort of candidate will be ultimately more undesirable for the health service as a whole.

[sauron19.livejournal.com]

Given what just happened to Jacki, no. What we need is to actually use the money in the NHS properly instead of paying managers and adminstrators ludicrous quantities of money to run it into the ground.

We also need to get more intelligent people looking at it as a career choice. Given the choice of 2 careers which require the same skills and one pays 1.5 times what the other does, which would you pick? Only the truly dedicated will pick the former and that's the kind of person who's going into nursing right now. Wonderful people, but there just aren't enough of them.

Christina is trying to get into nursing at the moment. She's had to take quite a lot of GCSE and A-levels (maths, biology, chemistry, physics etc..) and she's getting fantastic grades. No university will touch her at the moment simply because she's got a degree already, it's just not an honours one. If she was straight out of school with the grades she's got, they'd be falling over each other to snap her up. Now that sucks.