With regard to your recent article (NHS trusts hiring non-nurses for nursing roles, union warns, 9 June), I am an NHS manager and an occupational therapist. I am sure that the Royal College of Nursing is rightly concerned at the increasing numbers of unfilled qualified posts across the National Health Service, but denigrating the skills and professionalism of colleagues in allied health professions in favour of nursing is not the way to go about expressing it.
I manage a multidisciplinary community mental health team that employs nurses, occupational therapists and social workers. We all work hard to deliver safe and effective care to clients in our caseloads under increasing pressure, as staff across our trust are making good on their promises to retire and retrain after working night and day through the pandemic.
If the RCN succeeded in keeping allied health professionals from generic roles, half the clinical teams would blink out of existence overnight. I would ask our nursing colleagues to see the allied health professions as an asset, not a threat.
Sarah McCulloch
London
