We must offer real incentives to nurses

THERE are no two ways about it – there is a staffing crisis facing the Welsh NHS. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine estimates that at least 100 more consultants are needed in areas like A&E, while there are widespread shortages of junior doctors, trainees and nurses trained in emergency medicine.

It’s a similarly difficult situation in primary care where GPs are either retiring early in record numbers, or going part-time to have a better work-life balance.

The same problem is occurring in community and district nursing, as well as cancer nursing. Research by the charity Macmillan estimates Wales will need to achieve an 80% increase in the number of cancer nurses by the end of this decade to deal with growing patient demand.

Staff in our NHS have been through so much turmoil and uncertainty since the pandemic’s start. At the very start thousands of workers were asked to take on temporary roles in unfamiliar fields of medicine. Many were thrust onto the frontline of Covid care while running the risk of becoming unwell themselves.

And now, while the vast majority of us have returned to our everyday lives, Covid is still an issue in hospitals across most of the country. Worse still, medics are also faced with the daunting task of trying to tackle the record-breaking backlog of planned NHS care.

Therefore in some ways it can come as no surprise that, according to the Nursing and Midwifery Council, there has been a 13% rise in the number of nurses and midwives leaving their roles in the past year. Staff are burnt out, feeling the pressure and would, in some cases, earn more working in a supermarket.

The incentive to remain within the health service is driven, for many, by a desire to help people rather than for any financial benefit. But when nurses are turning to food banks to make ends meet you know there’s something fundamentally wrong.

In fairness, Wales has led the way among the UK nations in terms of boosting staffing levels. We were the first country to move to an all-graduate profession for nursing, and the first to implement a law to ensure that “safe” levels of nursing staff were on duty in some acute settings. We have also kept the nursing bursary which was scrapped in England.

Going forward the Welsh Government must ensure that we retain the nurses and midwives we have by offering proper incentives, and encourage more to choose it as a profession.