‘DON’T cut bursaries!’ and ‘Jeremy Hunt, Shame on You!’ shouted a crowd of around 500 student nurses and supporters, both Unison and RCN members, at a lobby of the Department of Health HQ, Richmond House, in Whitehall yesterday.
Chancellor Osborne announced in his Autumn Statement that in future nurses will have to pay for their training, their bursaries will be ended and they will have to take out student loans. Jacob Smith, told News Line: ‘We are here to fight back against the proposed NHS bursary cuts.
‘These affect student nurses, student midwives, student physiotherapists, student dieticians and medical students in their fourth and fifth years. ‘I feel it’s an outrage when students are already having to take jobs alongside their studies to simply get by. I want the unions to join together to fight back.’
Lynne Hutchinson, a retired nurse, said: ‘My friend and I did our nurse training after we’d started young children. Had we not had a bursary we couldn’t have afforded the training. ‘To take on that much debt and not have a bursary would have meant we could not afford to become nurses. I think they will have a real recruitment crisis for new nurses if students face loads of debt. We already have recruitment problems and are bringing in foreign nurses, taking them away from countries that cannot afford to lose them.Ending bursaries will make things worse. My local hospital has already got 120 vacancies unfilled.’
Student nurse Rachel Perkins said: ‘We’re demanding that we keep our NHS bursaries. The majority of student nurses and midwives wouldn’t be able to study if they were forced to take out loans and end up with over £51,000 of debt which would take over 100 years to pay back.
‘This will disincentivise people from studying nursing. The NHS is reliant on a huge workforce. If nurses and midwives were not coming in to be trained the NHS would be under even more strain than it is already. We should put our foot down and say you are not taking the bursary away from us.’
Mark Boothroyd, a staff nurse and Unite member, said: ‘I am against the bursary being cut and taking away our unsocial hours payments. It will create a recruitment crisis for the NHS.’
Student nurse Helen Corry said: ‘The bursary for us is our lifeline. Many of us here come into nursing and midwifery later in life. We need the bursary to keep us afloat (while we train). Taking it away will stop thousands of us doing what we are so passionate about. It will negatively impact on the NHS which is so short of staff and underfunded as it is.’
