Why don’t young girls today want to be nurses like my mum?
From red carpet to real life... Reid all about it
AT THe heart of my family is a woman who has spent 60 years taking care of others. Nurse Grandma, as we affectionately call her — my mum Sue — is who everyone in our family calls when there’s a cough that won’t go, or a temperature that needs bringing down.
She is well qualified for the role, having started her training to become a state registered nurse at Westminster Hospital days after her 18th birthday.
She took her finals in 1962, and was so proud of wearing her ‘frilly’, the distinctive nurse’s cap awarded once students had graduated.
If only we all had a nurse looking after our family. In fact, if only we had enough nurses at all. I can understand why the Conservatives have put nurses at the centre of their election manifesto.
There are 43,000 nursing vacancies in england alone, with little prospect of filling them all. This figure is predicted to soar to 100,000 without major Government intervention.
Too few nurses puts patients at risk. It also risks the mental and physical health of the nurses we do have, as the fewer staff there are on a ward, the harder it gets to pick up the pieces.
So, how did we get to the point where it’s tough to persuade young people to put on the modern equivalent of that frilly cap?
Now there are unlimited career choices for women —and let’s not forget that the majority of nurses are still female — nursing has to compete with so many options. mum wonders if the requirements of short nails, tied back hair and limited weekends off could be an obstacle, which she says is a pity, as few careers can give the satisfaction of knowing that your skills and care truly make a positive difference to people’s lives. We all had so much respect for what my mum did when I was growing up. Sadly, I can’t help but feel that part of the problem is that nurses aren’t being treated with the same respect now — especially by our politicians. The Conservatives have pledged to bring in 50,000 more nurses. But, within hours of that announcement, Nicky morgan, the senior Tory sent out to defend those numbers, admitted 19,000 of those would be current staff the NHS would persuade to stay on. A doublecounting trick like that is not going to fill the gap. meanwhile, on the Labour side,
Jeremy Corbyn has accused the Tories of offering up the NHS for sale, with disputed evidence to back up this claim.
New nurses just aren’t coming through. Since George osborne abolished bursaries for would-be nurses and replaced them with student loans in 2015, 10,000 fewer people a year have applied to do nursing degrees. It’s tough to train when you don’t have funding.
The public sector pay freeze hasn’t helped, either.
In a report from the royal College of Nursing last year, evidence included newly qualified staff crying because of stress. Nurses complained of unsafe staffing levels and felt at risk if something went wrong.
Instead of respecting nurses, we have started blaming them for problems they don’t create. And, in doing so, we are making everyone less safe.
my mum is proud to have been a nurse. At the beginning, she worked a basic 44-hour week, split shifts, night shifts and rarely had a weekend off.
The pay wasn’t great, but the status was. London taxi drivers would give nurses free rides. But she came to despair of the way nursing had turned into a daily grind of meetings and targets to chase.
When I was little, I wanted to be a nurse like my mum. But, as I got older, something significant ruled me out.
I hated the sight of blood. I didn’t want to handle the gore or the grime. I admire anyone who does, but I can’t help wondering whether, increasingly, young people who want the ‘perfect’ life offered by Instagram are turning away from the reality of getting their hands dirty.
In the early years of her training, mum remembers spending the night at the bedside of a patient who had been brought back to life by a surgeon massaging his heart.
mum’s job was to continually monitor his blood pressure and pulse, his dressings and drains. In the morning, he opened his eyes, saw my mum and murmured: ‘oh, it’s you, nurse, am I oK?’ He was, because she was there. Nurses are not political footballs — they are a pillar of medical care. And there’s no election pledge more important than the one to nurse this vital profession back to full health.