We are all meant to be working together to support patients. With reference to calls for agency rates enquiries, Mr Dobson would do better to analyse why nurses are leaving the profession. Perhaps he should try to survive on 12-14,000 a year. Then he might understand why nursing agencies, with better hourly pay rates , are doing so well. Most nurses would not survive without extra agency work.
Most nurses are only just able to live, never mind have holidays .
SAYS RCN Nurses are learning to sell their labour to the highest bidder and the NHS has only itself to blame, argues Mike Travis of The Royal College of Nursing safety representatives committee Whatever the result of the ensuing debate over the profits of nursing agencies , there will be one factor that will be either ignored or not identified. And while the NHS Trade Unions, the NHS employers, and the government are engaged in their annual ritualised pay exercise of fiddling while Rome burns ordinary nurses are embarking on the only option open to them - selling their labour to the highest bidder . Such an approach by individual nurses produces a maelstrom for the established structures that govern, employ and represent the NHS nursing workforce. The employer will have to compete for nurse labour in an unregulated labour market. Trade Unions will have their power in the workplace compromised.