The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) members have passed a motion urging the government to look at alternatives ways to fund nurse training and education after the student bursary is withdrawn.
Kathryn Davies, a student member of the RCN’s council, spoke about how damaging the removal of the bursary would be. She said that it would take her ‘a hundred years’ to pay back a loan as a band five nurse. Before she began speaking, Congress Chair Stuart McKenzie urged nursing students to join her on stage, where they received a standing ovation from the hall. ‘There are so many pink T-shirts behind me, all feeling as strongly as I do,’ said Ms Davies.
Proposing the resolution, RCN Students Committee member Rhys Mood said that the plans are ‘high risk’, and ‘deeply concerning’. He argued that nursing deserves a special position within education, saying ‘to say we need to be brought in line with "normal" students is unfair.’
One of the reasons that student nurses should be considered different is due to the long placement hours they have to undertake to complete their degree. One student, Katie Sutton from Salford University said that during her last placement, she had been awake at home for just 20 minutes each day. ‘Under these new rules, I wouldn’t be a student nurse,’ she said.
Other speakers in the debate said that there were not enough mentors to give every one of the 10,000 additional students a placement, while others argued that a nurse could even be looking at taking 284 years to pay back the loans.
Betty Kershaw, a former president of the RCN said that it was curious that the plans would only affect England. She also said that if the proposals did go through, she called for three guarantees on where funding should be spent – on placement providers and mentorship; paying students on placements the national living wage; and audit to ensure money reaches where it is supposed to go.