Tory Promise of Extra Nurses is Ten Years Down The Line

The extra nurses promised by Boris Johnson to ease staff shortages in places like Southport & Ormskirk Hospital will not be here for TEN YEARS a Cabinet Member has admitted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpcY6HsGmAM

Boris Johnson’s manifesto pledge would bring about 180 extra nurses to the two hospitals mainly serving Southport, if they are to be believed. However, speaking on both the BBC and ITV, Mr Johnson’s Culture Secretary, Nicky Morgan, said the additional nurses would be in place “if you look in 10 years’ time.” She also had great difficulty explaining how the government would convince current nurses not to leave.

It has further emerged that 18,500 of the 50,000 extra nurses nationally promised in the Conservative election manifesto would NOT even be new recruits but would be simply existing staff that the government will try their best to persuade to stay in the NHS.

Ms Morgan’s revelation that the ‘nurse number’ pledge will not to be met at all in the next five years is fuelling claims that the Conservatives are making NHS manifesto pledges that they have no plans to deliver in the next parliament. If the new nurses came in ten years, that would be after four or five more General Elections at the rate that the Conservatives are calling them these days. And the Tory pledge to bring in extra Family Doctors made five years ago have actually been met with a FALL in the number of GPs since then.

Boris Johnson has repeatedly stated that his government will build “40 new hospitals”, despite the government providing money to upgrade only SIX hospitals before 2025, with some vague further investment to follow at some unknown later date.

Nikki Morgan told ITV’s “Good Morning Britain”: “There will be overall – and we are very, very clear on this – 50,000 more nurses if you look in 10 years’ time than there are today.”

Insisting that these nurses would all be “new” even though 18,500 of them already work in the NHS, Ms Morgan then said: “If we are able to persuade them and to encourage them to stay, that is good news for nursing care in this country.”

Then, speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today, Ms Morgan appeared unable to explain how the government planned to convince thousands of nurses not to leave the NHS, claiming only that recruiting more staff would help persuade existing employees to stay.