Jobhop Jobhop's blog : How Do We Make Nursing The Number One Career Choice?
What Do We Do To Make Nursing The Number One Career Choice?
The current situation is that the NHS needs to recruit 40,000+ nurses. Unless nurses can be recruited quickly the NHS will not be able to meet the demand of healthcare over the next decade.
Fewer nurses = compromised care = it affects all of us!
We need more nurses! We need to stop them from leaving! We need them to come back!
There are parts of the NHS where they are only filling one in four hundred vacancies!
Let's make nursing the number one career choice, but how do we do that?
There is so much negative NHS news which stops people wanting a career in nursing. If the papers are only going to report the negative stuff then we need to take it upon ourselves to use social media to broadcast all the good stuff.
Educate people through positive stories. Allow nurses to showcase the positives of their job, and share with others why they love being a nurse.
The NHS has so many benefits on offer but when you speak to anyone about them no-one knows what they are. From gym passes, running clubs, discounted pizzas, discounted cars, physio and much more, the NHS should talk more about what the great offers are .
Share the good stuff, stop allowing the negative stuff to shape people's perceptions of what it's like to be a nurse.
As well as attracting nurses to the NHS, there needs to be a root cause analysis done as to why trained nurses leave the NHS.
It costs an estimated £80,000 over three years to train a nurse, wouldn't it be nice to keep nurses once they're trained!
What to do?
The NHS should look at the outdated hierarchy which contributes to people leaving their nursing careers.
As well as the hierarchy there are outdated systems which are frustrating; why the repetitive form filling when technology can make it more efficient.? Better technology can release nurses to do what they do best, and that's to care for people. When nurses become frustrated it becomes another reason for them to leave the profession.
Hierarchy, frustration and add a toxic work environment and you can see why after their nurse training many become unhappy. Scrolling through tweets on Twitter from nurses, it's easy to come across mentions of bullying, or pressure to do more when they are exhausted, this isn't acceptable. The NHS should have a culture of supporting and caring for one another. Of course, some parts of the NHS are exactly that but the NHS needs to be holistic and not fragmented.
Once the culture is sorted and positive stories outweigh the negative ones, the NHS can focus on making nursing cool again.
It used to be the case that young people wanted to be a nurse or doctor when they grew up, not so much these days!
Bloomberg claims a third of children aged six to 17 would like to be a full-time YouTuber.
What makes being a YouTuber such a cool job?
"Because you can play games all day," answers eight-year-old Spencer Parker.
Five of the top ten earning YouTubers in 2018 were men who streamed themselves playing video games, and as such, thousands of young boys have a new ambition. Bloomberg
We need to reach these young people & let them know that nursing is cooler than being a Youtuber, you get to save lives, nothing is cooler than that!
We also need to alert young people about the fierce future competition over jobs.
McKinsey Global Institute predicts that 800 million workers worldwide could be replaced by robots by 2030. Many young people who are studying for jobs that won't even exist by the time they leave school.
But, humans will always need caring for and there is only so much a robot can do.
Robots will help and aid nurses to do their jobs more efficiently. Robots will enable nurses to devote more of their time to caring for their patients But robots do not have compassion, empathy or instinct, which makes a nursing job a very secure future job. Young people should be encouraged to do jobs that require emotional intelligence which robots don't have, which makes nursing a great career to pursue.
For people who are realising that future jobs are going to become scarce, now is the time act, retrain as a nurse.
JOIN Jobhop and spread the word.
Julie Bishop Jobhop.co.uk
- Career