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Student nurses asked to re-join Covid fight in second wave

Emergency standards reintroduced to allow student nurses to work in NHS

Student nurses are once again being asked to start work and relieve the “enormous pressure” on the NHS as Covid cases continue to rise.

Emergency standards were last introduced in March 2020 to allow student nurses to work on NHS frontlines during the first wave of the pandemic. Covid cases in hospitals fell during the summer and the standards were withdrawn in September.

But the Nursing and Midwifery Council revealed on 14 January that it would reintroduce emergency standards for students following a plea from health secretary Matt Hancock, who told the NMC that the “urgent deployment of nursing students is necessary to respond to the extraordinary pressures that the service is now facing” in a letter on 13 January.

Hancock asked the NMC to reintroduce the standards “as quickly as possible” to allow nursing students “who wish to make an even more vital contribution to tackling the pandemic to opt into paid clinical placements”.

“As a nation, we are already indebted to nursing students for the extraordinary contribution they made to that collective effort last year and once again, together with the NHS, I am asking them to join their colleagues in the fight against the pandemic,” he said.

It means that some students will once again be able to work for the NHS during their course. The letter did not mention tuition fees—during the first wave, student nurses who worked for the NHS were still expected to pay fees despite pressure on the government to waive payments.

However, unlike last year, only third-year nursing students will be eligible to take part in the paid placements with the NHS and they will not be considered supernumerary. Students in their first and second years will “remain in their education programmes in clinical placements and undertaking academic learning”.

Hancock stressed that the Department for Health and Social Care, the Chief Nursing Officer for England and Health Education England were “already working closely with universities” to minimise the impact on students’ education and to “put in place measures to ensure the future graduation of the nursing students as soon as possible once the current emergency subsides”.

In response Andrea Sutcliffe, chief executive and registrar of the NMC, said that although the regulator had “sought to normalise education for student nurses and midwives” since the first wave of the pandemic, it was “mindful of the enormous pressures the current emergency situation is causing for the health and social care workforce as well as for people who use health and care services”.

The need for emergency standards will be reviewed in 12 weeks.