‘Tired’ nurses and industrial strikes sees fall in applications, university says

The UK’s largest provider of healthcare courses said seeing nurses “tired” and on strike had led to a fall in applications by almost 25 per cent.

Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) trains around 1,000 nurses each year and said an increase from the pandemic had dropped off.

The Department of Health said it was on track to recruit 50,000 nurses by March 2024, but many of those have come from abroad.

Louise Jenkins from ARU said it wanted “local people to come and train and stay local”.

Applications to nursing courses at ARU were just over 2,000 in 2020 and increased by around 50 per cent to just over 3,000 in 2021.  There was a small decrease in 2022, but applications dropped to 2,169 this year, a 23 per cent decrease from last year.

Figures from the admissions services Ucas show a similar pattern, with applications increasing from 2019 to 2022, but returning to pre-pandemic levels this year.

Ms Jenkins, ARU’s head of school for nursing and midwifery, said “People have seen that nurses and other healthcare workers are getting tired.  They’re seeing things, such as strikes on the news, and so we have seen a decrease in applications by about 20 per cent in the last year.

“It is a real shame that people are not applying, we do need nurses to do the training.”

She went on to say “It’s been fantastic that lots and lots of nurses have come in from abroad.  But we also want local people to train because those are people that are not going to want to go back to their own country and their own families.”

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Posted by Karen Motley, Clinical Negligence Department, Chadwick Lawrence LLP (jacquelinevance@chadlaw.co.uk), medical negligence lawyers and clinical negligence solicitors in Huddersfield, Leeds, Wakefield and Halifax, West Yorkshire.

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