A useful answer to a shortage is to make it easier to supply

If there’s a shortage of something then a useful response is to make it cheaper to supply the item. That should increase the number supplied. Cost here, the thing we would reduce, comes in many forms of course. We’re not just talking simple £ and p, but things like regulations, form filling, time to gain a qualification and so on.

At which point we can proffer some advice to Polly Toynbee:

Before anyone gets carried away by Boris Johnson’s eulogy for his life-saving angels, the facts of nursing life are brutal and it’s worth recounting them in detail. In recent years, leavers have outnumbered joiners by up to 3,000 and the more nurses quit, the harder it becomes for those who stay in understaffed wards. Remember this epidemic began with the highest ever number of nurse vacancies: 44,000 in February. But, says Anne Marie Rafferty, the president of the Royal College of Nursing and professor of nursing policy at King’s College London, that’s not a true reflection: “Those vacancies run on affordability. That’s only the number of nurses they can pay for, not the number needed.” Even the 10,000 retired nurses who have returned to help out in the crisis, mostly not on the frontline, don’t cover those lost since 2010, she says.

Nurse training was an early casualty of George Osborne’s axe-swinging 2010 budget. Despite recent efforts, numbers are still down on 2010, though the decade saw a huge increase in patients, who are far sicker in a population with 25% more over-65s. After the 2016 cavalier removal of nursing bursaries, applicants fell by 24%

We have fewer nurses than we might like to have. Why? Well, no, it’s not just that the Tories hate Angels:

All new nurses in England from 2013 will have to be educated to degree level from 2013, the Department of Health has announced.

The before the Tories government - yes, for the young, such a thing has happened in our green and pleasant land, non-Tories have been in government - decided to make becoming a nurse a hugely more expensive enterprise. As happens with these things humans, when faced with something more expensive, do less of it.

Worth noting that exactly this move of nursing to all graduate entry was something roundly - even enthusiastically - praised by Ms. Toynbee when it happened. Indeed, our own memories insist that she agitated for it before it did.

It’s entirely possible to insist that there is more than one factor at work here. But it’s impossible to be even vaguely truthful and try to insist that making nursing a more expensive - in that training time - occupation to enter has nothing to do with the perceived shortage of nurses.

By the way, one of us has direct experience of family members training under the old and new systems. No, the new is not better. We’re not even getting an increase in quality out of the greater expense and lower supply.