The first plan for nurses – demand employment!

Britain’s nurses have not been rushing to engage with the NHS England ten-year plan, released on 2 July. This is less to do with the content of the plan, but more a sense of despair. Neither NHS management nor government is up to planning anything as far is nursing is concerned.

Newly qualified nurses usually apply for their first staff nurse position in July each year. But this year there are few posts available due to a recruitment freeze across many NHS trusts. This has been reported in the media, but without any apparent government or management response.

Disaster

It is a workforce planning disaster. Few who are not nurses fully appreciate how important it is to start that first job post qualification quickly and just how steep the learning curve is in the first-year after qualification.

‘Delay starting in a first post increases the risk of never practicing.’

Newly qualified nurses learn even more than they do during training: their new responsibility turbo charges learning. Any delay in starting that first post means an increased risk of never practicing after a training which costs the taxpayer £67,000 for each nurse. And the individual newly qualified nurse is burden with an average £54,000 debt.

Failed before

This has happened before. The NHS has failed more than once to have jobs available for newly qualified nurses and midwives or it has adopted policies leading to shortages – which we reported in 2021 for example.

The current crisis is particularly hard for this cohort of students. Politicians and media commentators are apt to say that British workers are not prepared to do certain jobs. After the gruelling impact of the pandemic, it a decline in applications for nursing courses might have been expected.

Distressing

The opposite happened, with an increase in applications in 2021 and 2022. Possibly young workers realised the value of what nurses do. It must be quite distressing for this cohort of post pandemic students, who started their courses in Sept 2022 and who are now qualifying, to experience a job famine despite acute shortages on wards.

This lack of employment opportunity is now having a profound impact on recruitment. There has been a 35 per cent drop in the number of people applying to study nursing in England in September 2025 – only 23,730 applications compared to 36,410 in 2021.

Onus

All workers depend on the health service. There is an onus on us to demand a solution to this problem. And it must be more specific than a general cry to spend more on health.

‘An obvious difficulty is that recruitment is carried out by individual trusts.’

One of the obvious difficulties is that recruitment to NHS posts is carried out by individual trusts rather for the service as a whole. The existence of separate organisations for Scotland and Wales is no help either.

But there is scope for central action within a national service. One immediate measure which could be considered is that the NHS centrally should offer staff nurse posts at the usual pay level rather than fund private agency staff.

Agency type roles are not ideal for newly qualified staff but a far better option than losing them all together. Each trust could have its own pool of newly qualified staff; the money spent on agency fees could be used to fund additional support for the newly qualified.

Demand

Newly qualified nurses and midwives might also consider other action. But what could they do? The founding chairman of the CPBML once said that the unemployed should present themselves in the workplace demanding to be employed.

If newly qualified nurses and midwives did this in 2025, they would be overwhelmed by public support. And it would be hard for ministers and NHS management to ignore them.