A CLEAR warning of a mounting shortage of nurses that will hit health care in East Lancashire, as it peaks to crisis-level in the next two years, was sounded by the profession today.

But the alarms bells being sounded at the annual conference of the Royal College of Nursing will have an ironic ring with those in our region who recall the quite recent experience of student nurses being put on the dole once they had qualified - for lack of vacancies.

It is evident from the figures provided by the RCN that nursing numbers are in steep decline.

Only 9,000 are expected to qualify in the coming year; 28,000 fewer than 15 years ago.

This, of course, reflects the growing emphasis on primary health care and the immense changes in hospital care over the period as modern surgical and treatment methods cut patients' length of stay and drastically reduce the number of beds. But, perhaps, another influence is evident.

Restricted NHS resources have been fed into the growing administration costs caused by the creation of the internal market and, as a result, the surgery in nurse staffing levels has been too deep and the recruitment, that might naturally occur to offset the shortages, has been blocked.

Certainly, high-profile instances of lack of intensive care beds as a result of a shortage of specialised nursing skills and seasonal beds crises in many hospitals add support to the nurses' claim of a crisis in the offing.

And the burdens that this places on the shrunken nursing workforce nationwide - in terms of workloads and stress - presents an uninviting image of the occupation to would-be recruits and compounds the apparently Catch 22 situation of there being fewer nurses while evidently more are needed.

Time, as the nurses say, for the government to take its head out of the sand and act to prevent a critical situation becoming a crisis.

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