Responding to a report from the World Health Organisation highlighting health workforce challenges across Europe, RCN General Secretary and Chief Executive, Pat Cullen, said:
“This report highlights the crisis the country faces with too many nurses poised to retire and too few coming into the system.
“It finds a fifth of the UK’s nursing workforce is reaching retirement age and that the UK is churning out too few nursing graduates – less than the average for other European countries and less than half as many as Romania, Albania and Finland.
“Ministers across the UK must take note. Urgent investment in nursing must include fair pay and measures to boost the domestic workforce, such as funding tuition fees.
“This report calls for nursing staff and other healthcare workers to be put at the centre of the economic and social recovery after the pandemic – fair pay is a simple way to recruit and retain nursing staff and keep patients safe."
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