News

Some nurses could earn more money working in a supermarket, MPs told

Poor pay, increasing paperwork and less time for patient care are factors in chronic staff shortages, a nurse tells parliamentary committee

Poor pay, increasing paperwork and less time for patient care are factors in chronic staff shortages, a nurse tells parliamentary committee

Nurse Gamu Nyasoro speaking to the parliamentary committee. Picture: Parliamentlive.tv

Some nurses could earn more money working in a supermarket than staying in their own profession, and this fact is adding to the workforce crisis, a nurse has told MPs.

Gamu Nyasoro, a nurse and clinical skills and simulation manager at Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, raised concerns around NHS staffing levels and pay incentives when she spoke at a parliamentary health and social care select committee meeting on 1 March.

‘We need to be paid fairly’ if we want a robust nursing workforce

MPs were told that pay is one of the main factors deterring nurses and other healthcare professionals from staying in the profession, or choosing it as a career.

‘There is always talk like ‘If I work in Aldi, I will earn more than a nurse’, which in some circumstances is true,’ Ms Nyasoro said. ‘We need to be paid fairly for the care that we are giving to the population.’

Staffing crisis exacerbated by huge workloads, says nurse

Ms Nyasoro told the inquiry, which focused on workforce, recruitment, training and retention, that since she began working as a nurse nearly 20 years ago there has always been a workforce crisis.

‘There is never a time I have worked where we had adequate workforce numbers. We’ve got more paperwork to complete and not enough nurses to look after the patients,’ she said.

Ms Nyasoro warned that nursing shortages were resulting in nurses’ time being task-focused instead of centred around patient care. She added that nurses are unable to spent as much time with patients as they would like because they have a huge workload to get through.

Put more trust in overseas nurses’ experience, MPs told

She suggested that one way to address staffing pressures would be to provide better support for overseas nurses when they come to work in the UK. Rather than view international nurses as newly qualified, they should be trusted to perform complex tasks based on their experience overseas, she told MPs.

‘Overseas nurses are taken as newly qualified nurses coming from university, even when they have experience – some of them have been running hospitals. We need to honour that experience, we need to pay for that experience,’ she said.

Ms Nyasoro called on MPs to talk to nurses on the ground to gain a better understanding of the challenges they face.


In other news

Jobs