Number of nursing students accepted is 'a worry', Neil Gray says

Figures published by applications body Ucas this week showed that 3,530 students were accepted onto Scottish university courses in the field this year.

This was more than 1,000 below the Scottish Government target of 4,536 places for nursing this year.

In an interview on the BBC’s The Sunday Show, Neil Gray was asked how challenges within the NHS can be addressed if there are not enough staff, and was questioned about how more people can be persuaded into nursing.

He said: “This is the focus of the nursing and midwifery task force, which has just concluded its first phase of work and will be reporting early in the new year around its recommendations on attracting and retaining nurses and midwives.

“It’s a worry for me that those courses that are available and the support that’s available for people to come through those courses is not being taken up to the levels that we want them to be.

“Some of it comes down to making sure that it is an attractive profession to work in, and obviously that’s why I want to make sure we get the balance right around the narrative of the health service, where I am celebrating the successes of it, as well as recognizing it’s challenging.”

He added: “Alongside the structural or indeed the service delivery reforms and improvements that we need to make we need to make it easier for staff to be able to do their jobs, to make it easier for them.

“That makes it more attractive, I recognise that, and part of the recommendations that will be coming through the nursing and midwifery task force is about supporting staff better.

“It’s about recognizing that we need to make sure that the pressure is reduced.”

Mr Gray said he accepts that some hospitals in Scotland are under pressure, some of which is driven by peaks in demand.

He said he is looking to work with health boards and health and social care partnerships to ensure the flow of people passing through hospital and then out into the community is working well.

Mr Gray also said that he did not accept BMA Scotland’s description of the NHS in Scotland as being in a state of “perma-crisis”.

He said: “I think I can understand for those patients, or indeed those staff that are waiting too long or that are feeling under pressure, that that could be a description or a feeling that they will have, but the majority of people experiencing and using our health service receive a good service in good time with incredibly dedicated, professional, well trained, compassionate staff.”

Scottish Conservative shadow health secretary Dr Sandesh Gulhane MSP said: “Scotland’s NHS is clearly in the grips of a winter crisis, yet Neil Gray cannot face up to the reality and admit how badly the SNP have mismanaged the health service.

“This incompetent SNP Government have been proven to have no vision whatsoever for our overstretched health service which has been left fighting for its life.

“We repeatedly warned that Neil Gray’s winter preparedness plan was not worth the paper it was written on.

“It’s high time the health secretary stopped pretending everything is fine in our NHS when suffering patients are bearing the brunt of this government’s failures.”