The other day I did something I would never have imagined doing before, I wrote and emailed a letter to the prime minister asking him to address the issue of why, after newly qualifying as a nurse in September, I will soon find myself out of work and possibly only employable as a healthcare assistant part-time in the NHS.
Just over three years ago I was working for a large well-known company in the private sector in a secure job. I had become disenchanted with the fact that my only incentive to turn up to work on a Monday morning was financial. I decided to do what I had wanted to do for many years, nursing.
It was, of course, a difficult decision to take three years out of my life to retrain. Three years was a manageable amount of time to cope with a huge change in financial circumstances, especially as it seemed certain there would be employment opportunities in many areas of nursing after qualification. At the time of my decision to go in to nursing, there had been months of television and newspaper advertisements encouraging people to retrain for a rewarding career in nursing, and news reports were full of the expanding NHS and the need for nurses.
My reason to retrain was simple. I wanted a career with opportunities that was demanding, dynamic, diverse, interesting and, very importantly, rewarding. At the age of 37 I decided to leave my job and embark on a career in nursing. I now know I have found my vocation.
My experiences so far have been diverse. I have dealt with challenges that in retrospect I would have thought completely beyond my capabilities.
I have experienced friendship, gratitude, distress, kindness, sadness, anger, violence, death, and humanity at is most basic. I have spent my day caring for around 30 patients with infectious diarrhoea and vomiting on an understaffed ward. I have been asked for my opinion in the care of patients by doctors, physiotherapists, nurses and other members of the medical multidisciplinary team. I have been given my own ward of patients to care for under the supervision of my qualified nurse mentor. I have been asked to follow the Nursing and Midwifery Code of Professional Conduct, and work a 37.5-hour week for a figure below the minimum wage while learning. I have attended university and gained passes in all of my essays and examinations.
My life has been changed inexorably due to these experiences, yet they could be written by any one of thousands of nursing students due to qualify this year.
My three years of training finishes in nine weeks time, and I will be a fully qualified registered nurse.
My local health trust has recently closed two wards, and they are currently re-deploying the nurses from the closed wards to other areas of the hospital. There are no jobs being advertised in the hospital trust because of what is termed a "job freeze". Along with a whole cohort of newly qualified nurses, I will be unemployed come September.
We have been advised unofficially to register for work with NHS Professionals in their nursing bank as a healthcare assistant or nursing assistant.
If I follow this route and do manage to gain some employment, I will be a fully trained nurse working for the local hospital trust as an unqualified healthcare assistant, and will be paid accordingly. I have very often worked on wards where the nursing students outnumber the members of trained staff. Without students it seems that many wards would have difficulty functioning. Maybe that is why my university is still advertising for nursing students to start in September and work in the same hospitals that cannot currently employ me or many of my student colleagues.
So what will I do? I have a mortgage to pay, my eldest son goes to university in September. I am currently attending interviews for jobs in the private sector for pharmaceutical companies who are interested in employing newly qualified nurses.
Is it what I am trained to do? No. Is it what I want to do? No. Have I had an answer from Tony Blair as to why I find myself in this position? No.
· Philippa Farmer is a pseudonym
