‘WITH more than 13,000 patients a day stuck in hospitals because the community and social care they need to be safely discharged is unavailable, it’s easy to see why health and care is at breaking point,’ RCN Director for England, Patricia Marquis, said yesterday.
The Royal College of Nursing was responding to the latest NHS England vacancy statistics and the urgent and emergency care daily situation report.
Marquis continued: ‘Combined with a record 47,000 nurse vacancies across the NHS in England, this is precisely the reason why our members have decided to strike – because the workforce gaps and being underpaid have made care unsafe.
‘Ministers have repeatedly ignored our calls to address the workforce crisis and to put serious investment in nursing, including fair pay.
‘They’ve also dismissed our offer of serious negotiations on pay and patient safety – unless the health secretary changes course 100,000 nurses will be walking out in two weeks’ time.’
- Commenting on the publication of ITT (initial teacher training) figures, showing recruitment levels well below the government’s own targets, Dr Mary Bousted, Joint General Secretary of the National Education Union, said: ‘The government’s teacher recruitment strategy is an abject failure. They have missed targets for both secondary and primary teacher recruitment. This is a disaster for our schools and our children.
‘There is no hiding from the dire situation that they have missed their own recruitment targets for trainee secondary teachers year on year, and at 59% of the target for secondary teachers this is comfortably the worst in recent memory.
‘In the lowest-recruited secondary subjects such as physics, the government has recruited as few as 1 in 6 of the trainees they say are needed.
‘Within primary teacher recruitment they are 7% below target, and this is the eighth time they’ve missed the target since 2010.
‘It is clear that the government’s real-terms pay cuts are having a devastating impact on teacher recruitment and retention.
‘Teacher pay levels are not sufficient to support teacher supply and an already critical recruitment and retention problem is getting even worse.
‘Teachers need an inflation-proofed pay rise. For those who do start a career in teaching, the burdens of over-work, external accountability, and low-reward drive out far too many within the first few years, wasting their time, talent, and training costs.
‘Teachers do not feel valued or trusted as professionals.
‘Our children and young people bear the brunt of this mismanagement and deserve far better.
‘Whilst retention problems are driven both by the excessive workload teachers face and poor pay, this recruitment disaster stems more than anything else from poor pay prospects for teachers.
‘Government must act on this urgently – there must be a fully funded pay rise which at least matches inflation if the government is to have any chance of hitting its targets next year.’