As a senior sister in an accident and emergency department at a hospital in Kent, Liz Taylor is on the frontline of NHS services. Taylor, 46, gave a cautious welcome to the chancellor’s announcement of extra funding for NHS England and the move to lift a cap on recruitment numbers by making student nurses pay for their own training through loans rather than grants or bursaries.
George Osborne unveiled an urgent £3.8bn increase in funding for NHS England, which Taylor worries may not be enough. “It’s a very pressured job. The patients are ill or injured and I have to manage their care while achieving government targets. The government says 95% of A&E patients should be seen, treated and discharged from A&E in four hours. It’s hard to meet the targets, especially in winter.
“In winter, the patients are more ill and there are more of them. A bed shortage in the hospital means they can’t always be admitted to the ward, so spend longer in A&E, meaning we miss the four-hour target.
“We probably need more hospital beds rather than more staff – then we could transfer patients from A&E more quickly. We only need more staff in A&E because patients spend longer than they should in the department.”
Taylor’s personal gripe is over pay. She is in NHS salary band seven, which means a full-time salary of £40,964, but as the mother-of-two she works part-time and her basic pay is £31,405.
In 2009-10, Taylor’s pay band was £39,273, so in seven years it has gone up just £1,691, or well below inflation.
“I’d like to see more money spent on patient care, proper pay for junior doctors and a pay rise for nurses,” she says. “The pay rises we had in 2013-14 and 2015-16 equate to about £33 a month before tax – that’s not much and not enough.”
Taylor welcomed the move to increase the number of nurses and reduce dependence on agency staff, but warned that substituting grants or bursaries with loans might deter many prospective students, so take-up might not be as high as the government is hoping for. This view was echoed by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN).
“The government has finally recognised that there is a nursing shortage and a promise of 10,000 extra health professionals in this parliament will be a boost to the health service,” said Janet Davies, RCN chief executive and general secretary.
“Student nurses aren’t like other students. Fifty per cent of their time is spent in clinical practice working directly with patients and their families, and they have a longer academic year. These proposals will saddle future generations of these student nurses with even more debt and financial pressures and unless nurses’ pay improves, many graduates will never be in a position to pay their loans back,” she added.
The Department of Health spends around £826m every year to fund 60,000 students through their three-year degree courses.
