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NHS staff wooed by golden hellos 

By: John Carvel
The Guardian, March 14, 2001 

Doctors' and nurses' leaders yesterday welcomed government plans to spend £168m over the next three years on a package of golden hellos and loyalty bonuses to attract more staff to the health service. 

Alan Milburn, the health secretary, said that GPs reaching the age of 60 who agree to continue working for the NHS until they are 65 will get a £10,000 "golden goodbye". The money will be invested in an interest-yielding bond pending retirement and those doctors forced to quit through ill health will be compensated with a pro rata payment. 

Newly qualified doctors will get a £5,000 "sign on" fee if they go into NHS general practice. Those choosing to work in "under-doctored" areas in poorer parts of the country, will get £10,000 instead. 

Nurses coming back to the NHS will get a £1,000 grant to help with their costs while they complete a 12-week refresher course. Trainee nurses will get a 10.4% increase in bursaries - a sum that adds £500 a year to the income of the average student on a diploma course. An extra £15m has also been earmarked for more NHS nurseries to help doctors, nurses and other staff with families. 

Mr Milburn said: "Doctors and nurses do a great job for the NHS and we need more of them. These measures are an important recognition of the work family doctors do and the need to make their careers more rewarding." 

The £56m annual recruitment and retention initiative is funded from the chancellor's £850m health budget. The inducements are intended to help reach targets in the NHS plan for an extra 20,000 nurses and 2,000 more GPs for the NHS in England by 2004. 

Mike Pringle, chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners, welcomed recognition by the government that there was a serious workforce crisis with GPs. "We are pleased they are working on recruitment and retention. We hope these initiatives will be successful. However, the scale of the workforce crisis is such that this can only be viewed as a beginning." 
Christine Hancock, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said: "For many nurses, the only thing preventing them returning to nursing has been the lack of financial support while they are on essential 'return to practice' courses. Providing £1,000 for [them] will go a long way towards addressing the problem." 

But the shadow health secretary, Liam Fox, said: "Recruiting and retaining doctors and nurses is proving so difficult because NHS staff morale is plummeting. Blame for that lies squarely at Alan Milburn's door. He should get off doctors' backs and allow them to spend more time seeing patients and less filling in forms." 

The government had told the nurses' pay review body that there was no need for a pay increase on the grounds of recruitment problems. Three months later it said the opposite. "Even by Labour's standards, today's announcement is an astonishing attempt at deception," Dr Fox said.