Affable Iain Dale who, with the exception of his appalling taste in ties, can do little wrong in the world of blogging, is supporting Noreena Hertz who has spent the last 2-3 months touring football clubs trying to get as a number of players as possible to give a day's pay to the May Day for Nurses campaign.

I hate it.

Not the kindness and generosity behind the scheme, but the need for the scheme to exist at all.
There is a nursing shortage looming: over 100,000 nurses will retire within the next 10 years, yet the government is cutting the numbers of new recruits. This despite the fact that our population is ageing and we will need more, not less, nurses in the future. By 2011 we will already be 14,000 nurses short. This will risk patients' lives. Wards with the lowest nurse-to-patient ratios see one in four more deaths than wards with the highest ratios.

Student nurses have a very raw deal. They are on average 29 years old (forget your image of a 20 year-old Bacardi drinking nightclub-going girl) and over half have either children or long-term sick or disabled relatives that they care for in addition to studying. A quarter are having to quit their studies, mainly because of financial pressure.

Nurses are seriously undervalued. It is absurd that in Birmingham some of the men who paint white lines in the middle of the road earn two and a half times more than some nurses. Even in comparison to other professional public sector workers, nurses fare the worst. A mid-career nurse will earn over a third less than a secondary school teacher at the same stage in his or her career.

Over a quarter of nurses are forced to take two or more additional jobs just to be able to continue nursing. We should not continue to exploit the kindness of nurses by forcing them to work several jobs just so that they can look after us when we are at our lowest ebb. (Mayday for Nurses) Why do we not just pay them properly?

Madness. Utter madness. What are we doing? Posted by: Dr John Crippen    Source

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