Nurses to get NHS bonus

The NHS needs thousands more nurses

Nurses are to be offered an extra £1,000 per year to take up jobs and remain working in the NHS.

The annual "recruitment and retention" allowance will be given to nurses working in London and other cities in England, where the cost of living is high.

The move is part of a government drive to recruit an additional 20,000 nurses over the next 10 years.

There are 15,000 unfilled nursing posts in England, with 5,000 of them in London, with rising property prices blamed for extra recruitment problems there.

Ministers will also announce plans on Monday to reward hospital doctors who devote most of their working time to the NHS and not to the private sector.

They are to scrap the current system for rewarding consultants, which can see them earn up to an extra £60,000 per year on top of their usual salaries.

Under the plans, special payments of £5,000 or more will be made to consultants who agree not to work outside the NHS.

But doctors have warned the scheme will not work and have called for sharp increase in their pay if the current system is scrapped.

Pay is not the whole story but it is an important factor in helping to motivate people

Dr Ian Bogle

The British Medical Association is set to ask the Doctors and Dentists Review Body, which recommends how much doctors should earn to ministers, for a 14% rise.

It says the money is needed to compensate doctors for the extra work they do some of which they say has been caused by the government's national plan for the NHS.

The BMA said a pay hike of at least 6% was needed from next April to maintain the profession's earnings, with a further 8% added to make up for the slippage in salaries since 1995.

The NHS plan included proposals to recruit an extra 7,500 consultants and 2,000 GPs by 2005.

Warning

But the BMA has warned that these extra doctors will not be found unless pay is increased substantially.

At the moment, GPs earn an average of £54,220 a year, while consultants start at £48,905 but can more than double that figure with bonuses.

BMA chairman Dr Ian Bogle said: "This year's review comes after the NHS Plan in England, in which the government acknowledged that the need for new doctors was so great that it would try to recruit more doctors from abroad.

"This shows the difficulty we have in attracting and training enough people at home and the burden this places on existing doctors.

"Pay is not the whole story but it is an important factor in helping to motivate people."