The Royal College of Nursing’s new report, Fixing the Leaking Pipeline – Addressing nursing education challenges, highlights the many challenges facing nursing education. The Council contributed to the development of the report and in response to its release our Chief Executive, Ed Hughes, has issued the following statement:
“The Council of Deans of Health was glad to be asked to feed into this report, sharing our policy priorities and the experiences of our members. The findings make for important reading.
The report’s finding that 3 in 5 universities have long-standing nurse educator vacancies will be all too familiar for our members while the challenges around student recruitment and retention are also emphasised.
This comes out at a particularly challenging time for universities and colleges, and the viability of some courses is already being called into question, putting the UK’s future nursing workforce at risk. We will need system-wide solutions that bring together the health and education sectors to address the issues raised in the report.
We will continue to work with our partners at the RCN to engage government on these really important issues of recruitment and retention to avert a future workforce crisis and ensure we have the educators and students needed for a sustainable NHS.”