Older nursing students to get £5,000 mental health bonus

THE NHS is to offer mature students a £5,000 bonus to become mental health or learning disability nurses.

The payment was a bid to tackle the shortage in areas NHS bosses and ministers had agreed to prioritise, The Guardian reported.

The “earn and learn support premium” is likely to focus on students aged over 25 who agree to specialise in nursing for patients with learning disabilities or mental health needs. Applications for undergraduate courses in nursing have plummeted by 32 per cent since bursaries were scrapped in England in 2016. Applications from mature students to study mental health and disability nursing fell even more sharply – by 40 per cent – between 2016 and this year. Prof Donna Kinnair, the Royal College of Nursing’s acting chief executive, said: “With nursing student numbers falling and the number of unfilled nurse jobs projected to rise as high as 48,000 in the next five years, the situation is desperate.”

A spokesperson for NHS England said: “Supporting NHS staff and improving NHS mental health and learning disabilities are both priorities and earlier this year we launched our largest ever campaign to recruit and train nurses in these specialist fields.”