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Editor's blog: Do nurses need to be graduates?
A great debate this morning about whether nurses need to be graduates. In four years' time, anyone who wants to become one of the nation’s 400,000 nurses will need to have a degree - one of the biggest shake-ups of medical education in the history of the NHS. More than a quarter of nurses, incidentally, already have a degree and the level of qualifications has risen steadily in recent years. But this has caused an almighty row. And not for the first time, the nursing unions seem to be making a lot more sense than the representatives of the NHS. There’s an awful lot of guff being spouted by the department about the need to 'meet the challenges of tomorrow' and for 'critical decision-making skills'. But I fail to see how the ability to learn how to make decisions is a graduate-only business... CLICK HERE TO READ MORE AND COMMENT
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Editor's blog: Do nurses need to be graduates?
Directors pass the buck to senior managers
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Jeff Allen 12-Nov-09, 14:11
Its not just a case of imposing a degree qualification on all nurses but how this will also affect the cost of nursing. Nursing salaries are over 9 bands with salaries starting at £13,233 and finishing at £95,333 \(2010 figures). The average starting degree based salary in the UK is around £ 22K and closer to £ 28K in London so are the government & the public willing to accept a huge hike in nursing pay overall?
More importantly is one size fits all the proper approach to the various types of nursing required, I would agree the NHS \(read non clinical managers) have yet again got it completely wrong its not broke so dont fix it.
Lawrence 12-Nov-09, 15:07
The first step down this road was when the government introduced the 'Nurse 2000' programme. It required student nurses to spend more time in the classroom than on the wards during their training. Nursing is a 'hands-on' job. Obviously they need to know what they are doing, medically, but they are the people who the patient has most and direct contact with. As Jeff said 'if it's not broke, don't fix it'. Will government ever learn this lesson and stop wrecking good working practices by fixing them?
James Taylor (Web Ed) 12-Nov-09, 15:15
excellent point re salaries. more money for nurses is generally a pretty uncontroversial cause, but this would presumably mean the total salary pot needing to rise massively...