DOBSON: OUR NHS DISGRACE

HEALTH SECRETARY Frank Dobson today branded as an "international disgrace" the recruitment of planeloads of foreign nurses as he went on the offensive over the NHS staffing crisis.

Blaming the previous Conservative administration for reducing nurse training places from 15,000 to 11,000, he accepted that some hospitals had little alternative but to ask patients' relatives to "muck in".

Mr Dobson, who is pressing the case for higher pay and better conditions to recruit nurses, spoke after a number of hospitals flew in staff from the Philippines and elsewhere to meet the shortfalls, as revealed by the Evening Standard this week. The problems have been worsened by the flu emergency which is putting the health service under immense strain. With the nurses pay review body due to report within weeks, he said he hoped its recommendations would be "sufficiently high to be attractive to people to come in and stay in nursing". While he would not pre-empt Cabinet discussions, he hoped to be able to pay the award in full without having to stage it as has happened so often with nurses and other key public service employees. Mr Dobson did not criticise managers for going abroad for staff, but said: "It is an international disgrace - a disgrace in most developing countries in the world. They talk about how much medical aid and assistance they are giving to the Third World and all over the developing world we are taking nurses and doctors away from them. "It takes three years to train nurse so the number of people coming out now is a product of the reduction they deliberately made." Mr Dobson said he wanted to see better pay, more flexible shifts, "family friendly" employment policies and better management close the gap. He said that while the Tories had denied there had been shortage in its evidence to pay review bodies, his Government had admitted its concerns. Asked on BBC radio about two Portsmouth hospitals which have put up signs asking the relatives patients to help out because of staff shortages and sickness, he said he did not deny their "real problems". "They have had a huge surge the demand for treatment. They have had difficulty in recruiting nurses. They have also had quite lot of sickness among nurses. "They put up a notice saying that if you could help it would be very useful. Very few people have taken offence because they recognise that in the really peculiar and difficult circumstances it is helpful if people can muck in." Labour published a report today saying: "Tory complacency and under-investment sowed the seeds for today's problems, including 8,000 nurse vacancies." The Government was acting now by opening up 15,500 new training places for nurses this year, the highest figure for six years. It said: "If the Tories had matched that commitment there could now be over 14,000 extra nurses working on the wards."

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