From the Royal College of Nursing yesterday:
The Conservative Party general election manifesto promises £5,000 maintenance grants for nursing students and a 50,000 increase in the number of NHS nurses in England by 2025. The party will not reinstate the nursing bursary, meaning students would still have to pay their tuition fees, which are currently capped at £9,250 a year.
That’ll work won’t it. Before you know it, they’ll have the same nursing ratio as Scotland where trainee nurses getting a bursary and paying no fees at all is kind of similar. In Scotland:
Thanks to a parliamentary question at Holyrood on April 27th, MSPs and state journalists were shocked to discover another area of NHS Scotland where the ‘staffing crisis’ they so confidently report, may not be real. NHS Scotland has 771 nurses for every 100 000 people whereas NHS England has only 518 – astonishingly NHS Scotland has over 48.84% more!
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
Also, as I understand it the 50,000 more nurses figure alleged by Tory politicians somehow magically includes 19,000 existing nurses whom they hope to persuade not to leave NHS England (see video of the ghastly Nicky Morgan being interviewed ?yesterday by the even more ghastly Piers Morgan)! On what basis can they be counted as “new” nurses?
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