As usual I don't get it. Until recently one of the ills of the NHS was its permanent shortage of nursing staff. Fair enough. Nurses were recruited abroad including in some third world countries that could have been a good thing for the individual nurse but a bad thing for that country. The Home Office was giving special visas for nurses and their families. In the London hospitals I have been it was not unusual to find a nurse with a very poor command of English. Fair enough. Now suddenly there are too many. And there will be too many in the future too as training places are cut. What I don't get is the total lack of planning shown in this case, I only see reactions caused by panic. 
The Royal College of Nursing, which represents nurses, said moves to cut the number of student nurses were short-sighted.
"It is madness," said RCN policy adviser Jane Naish. "We have an ageing population and workforce.
"We have already seen a decrease in the number of district nurses, and health visitor numbers are at a standstill.
"We have to have enough nurses coming through," she added. ...
Concerns were expressed at the nursing union's annual conference in Bournemouth, at which Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt was booed and heckled.
The union said up to 5,000 nursing jobs were to be cut in one region, the West Midlands, alone.
A Department of Health spokeswoman said: "When we launched the NHS Plan in 2000, the public made clear their top priority was to have more staff working in the NHS.
"We delivered on that, and exceeded the targets we set. We now have over 85,000 more nurses working in the NHS in England than in 1997."
