`Supernurses' to help rescue NHS

A NEW grade of highly paid "supernurses" will be unveiled today by the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, as a centrepiece of the Government's plans to modernise the National Health Service.

The nursing consultants, as they will be known, will be put in charge of their own clinics in an effort to dispel the "Carry On" image of nurses as doctors' handmaidens.

Mr Blair will reveal the new post with plans to create 6,000 nursing training places over the next three years when he attends the Royal College of Nursing's Nurse of the Year Award ceremony in London.

The "supernurses" will have their own list of patients and staff and will be allowed to run clinics in disciplines such as breast cancer care and cardiac rehabilitation. The post is an attempt to end the career ceiling that currently means any nurse who wants a higher salary and status has to abandon the wards and go into hospital management.

Mr Blair will claim that the creation of the new role is a key part of his drive to modernise the Health Service, and will promote nurses as skilled professionals rather than as "angels of mercy".

He will reiterate this summer's announcement that the comprehensive spending review will create 15,000 nursing jobs over the next three years.

In a drive to attract more women to nursing, Mr Blair will also call on NHS trusts to review their employment polices to make them more "family oriented". The Prime Minister will demand that hospitals offer more job- shares, child-friendly shift patterns and an overhaul of conditions of service.

He will call for self-rostering to give nurses, rather than managers, control of working arrangements and urge more "keep-in-touch" contracts that allow hospitals to keep jobs open for women who have career breaks for children. Mr Blair will tell the college: "Some nurses at a certain point in their career are happy to move into management, but many others want to progress but still retain direct, day-to-day contact with patients, the reason why they came into nursing in the first place. The creation of nursing consultant posts, rooted in clinical practice and in touch with patients and staff, would be one way of recognising and meeting that aspiration."

The nursing consultants would have the same status within nursing that medical consultants have within their profession. "The consultant nurses would provide a focus for developing and supporting specialist roles in the profession and provide nurses with an alternative career path."

At the moment, starting salary for a newly qualified nurse is pounds 12,600, rising to pounds 26,500 for the most senior grade of clinical nursing specialists. The structure dates from a grading scheme introduced by the Tories 10 years ago in an attempt to allow nurses to earn more at the highest level.

The Prime Minister is expected to make clear that while all nursing pay rises have to be affordable, the "supernurses" are likely to earn higher salaries than senior staff at present.

Ministers hope the anounce-ment will help to stave off union anger that the nurses' pay award is to be phased in over the next year. Nurses' pay is sure to be a key issue over the next few months, particularly in the light of public statements from Frank Dobson, Secretary of State for Health, that it should be higher.

Pay is seen by both the college and the traditionally more militant Unison as an important test of the Government's sta- ted desire to attract and retain more British nurses.

Recent evidence showed that poor pay and morale led thousands of nurses to go abroad, leaving the gaps to be filled by nurses from overseas.