Hansard

I am delighted and honoured to sponsor a motion to value and recognise the wide range of work done by Scotland's nurses and to support the RCN's value nurses campaign.

I welcome nurses to the public gallery and thank those who have contributed to our online discussions this week on the Parliament's interactive website forum.

Nurses account for one half of the NHS work force and 80 per cent of the care delivered by the NHS. Nurses are everywhere—in hospitals, schools, industries and care homes. They are in every community in Scotland and are the backbone of a caring NHS. They must be supported and valued by us. They are also crucial parts of professional teams of other NHS staff—of secretaries, doctors, cleaners, porters and lab staff, for example.

Over the summer recess, I took the opportunity to support RCN's campaign by shadowing some of our nursing staff as they went about their work. I shadowed Duneil Macloud, who works with homeless people at The Access Point in Edinburgh. The service is jointly funded by the health board and the City of Edinburgh Council social work department and provides a one-stop shop where professionals in health, social work and housing can help homeless people with complex needs. I sat in on a case conference. It was clear that Duneil and his colleagues dealt with a wide range of issues, from mental health to hepatitis C, safe sex issues, the aftermath of violence and problems relating to drug and alcohol misuse.

I spent a day with Graham Nisbet, who is a community detox nurse in Bannockburn. We visited former drug addicts in their own homes and listened to their stories of how they are coping on methodone programmes. Graham offered advice and support. It was clear that his job is not easy. When the former drug addicts cracked—as many did—he was still there telling them that they were not back at square one as they had been clean for three to six months or a year. He would tell them that it was time to be clean again.

I went to Glasgow for a night shift at the sick kids hospital at Yorkhill. Nurse manager and guide Mary Macauley kept me going. I am glad that she is in the gallery. I spent the night doing ward rounds with her as she dealt not only with clinical needs—such as putting a line into a seriously ill child—but with the infrastructure of the hospital. She dealt with the consequences of a terrible thunderstorm and rain coming through the oncology department roof. I do not think that I will be asked back—I was something of a Jonah.

I also met and talked to dozens of highly trained nurses, many of whom gave one-to-one care to babies in the neonatal wards and intensive treatment units. They told me that they were paid less than £20,000 after 13 years and extra training in their specialist field. In fact, a nurse would have to be a third year junior sister with eight years' experience to earn the same as a police constable who is just out of probation.

I spoke with parents—mums and dads who just sat, watched, waited and wished that their children were well. I wonder whether those parents thought that £20,000 is enough. I do not think that it is and I do not think that they did, either.

I thank the nurses who spoke to me and those who continually speak to me in my role as convener of the Health and Community Care Committee. Nurses speak to me openly about understaffing, pay, training, violence at work and the need for regular shift patterns. Many have thought of leaving, but few will. They are dedicated to their jobs and see that they make a real difference to Scotland every day.

We can make a difference, too. In the face of rising vacancy levels and falling student numbers, we must make a difference. We cannot change salaries—that is up to the independent pay review body—but all of us can lobby hard to ensure that nurses are given above inflation pay increases to help close the gap with other public sector workers.

We have the power to make a difference for nurses in many other ways. The Minister for Health and Community Care has made three welcome announcements in the past few weeks that will impact on nurses. A 10 per cent increase in bursaries was announced in July and £90 million of trust debts are to be written off—that will help to safeguard nursing jobs and many others. In the past few days, the minister announced details of the nursing recruitment and retention convention in November, which she vows—she confirmed this to me a few moments ago—will not be a talking shop, but will

"look at the key issues affecting recruitment and retention, and follow this up with the necessary initiatives to develop local and national actions towards achieving our shared objectives".

What key issues must be addressed? The motion says that we must do all that we can to recruit, retain and retrain nurses. Our nurses face an ad hoc lottery in trying to find a trust that will pay fees for them to do return-to-practice courses. If they undertake retraining, they are expected to do 150 hours of unpaid clinical placement at the end of it.

All in all the cost to the returning nurse is in excess of £1,000—even before transport to work and child care are included. It is essential that Susan Deacon look seriously at following Alan Milburn's example and announce £1,000 for each returner. We need them badly. We need their experience and we have a record number of vacancies to fill. It would be a good investment all round: for us, for the national health service and for nurses.

Nursing levels are at a record low. There are more than 1,600 nursing vacancies right now, including qualified places—accounting for 3.6 per cent of the nursing work force. The number of vacancies has risen by 48 per cent in the past year. We should be seriously worried about that and serious action must be taken to retain the staff we have, to recruit more and to retrain those who have left.

The RCN has shown in the past few days that there are 10,000 nurses who are no longer practising in Scotland. They are out there somewhere; in their homes, in call centres, in offices. One of them is even here in the Parliament. We have to do all we can to reach out to them and bring them back to nursing—apart from the one who is here in the Parliament.

We need greater flexibility in working and shift patterns and to improve the availability of child care. Time is not on our side: a quarter of NHS nurses will be eligible to retire within the next 10 years, yet the number of newly registered nurses fell by 7 per cent last year.

We should be doing more to encourage greater career development. In England, there are 3,000 consultant nurses whereas in Scotland, so far, there are only 12. Time and time again, the policy set out in "Our National Health: A plan for action, a plan for change", which we have all signed up to, relies on nurses for its success. Freeing up general practitioner time, delivering on waiting times, improving public health all rely—as does NHS24—on the flexibility of our nurses. They rely on nurses taking on new roles and taking on greater clinical responsibility than ever before. All that relies on a greater number of nurses—nurses who, right now, we do not have.

We rely heavily on our nurses for the responsibilities that are outlined in "Caring for Scotland: The strategy for nursing and midwifery in Scotland". "Nursing for Health: A review of the contribution of nurses, midwives and health visitors to improving the public's health in Scotland" means that we will rely on them even more in the years ahead.

We must address the needs of nurses, whether they be those of the community nurse who works single-handedly on one of our islands and finds it difficult to access training or they be those of an accident and emergency nurse in one of our urban hospitals who is trying hard to ensure that she is not added to the list of casualties on a Friday night. I know that the Minister for Health and Community Care, the deputy minister and the Parliament value our staff as highly as the rest of us do. Now is the time to turn our admiration into action.

I hope that the minister will act right away and give returners £1,000 towards their return-to-practice costs. I also hope that the nursing convention will address the wider issues that I have mentioned—which we will here more about in the debate—and send a clear message to Scotland's nurses that they are valued by the Parliament and by the people it serves.