Rayvin

Ewerk, please - what about the above isn't working for you? Please, I'm begging you

To try to simplfy things, I removed the 31,000 as part of my argument. We all agree on that point anyway. When I say net gain, I mean the 18,500 is a net gain. Let's just leave the 31,000 out of it.

No, because in this limited example we aren't talking about the 31,000. We're just talking about what is happening with the retentions. They're being kept and THEIR REPLACEMENTS IF THEY HAD LEFT ARE BEING HIRED ANYWAY. By the YEARLY INTAKE of recruited nurses which will remain CONSISTENT THROUGHOUT THE PERIOD.

Because I need to understand this and no one is actually able to explain to me why I'm wrong. You keep thinking you have but you haven't. Your last answer addressed nothing I said, other than to dismiss it as 'not what happens in reality'. Which bit isn't what happens in reality? In reality there isn't a yearly intake of new recruits? Where are you getting the figure of 31,000 new posts created from? Because the government and everyone else reporting on it continues to claim it's 50,000. I cannot understand for the life of me, why we are dismissing the fact that if intake numbers remain the same, and departures fall, this is a net gain. Quiff has actually proven the point already with his football analogy. It is a net. fucking. gain. At this point, I'll be honest with you - I want to be wrong. I really do. I want someone to just say "yeah but you haven't considered..." and then the penny will drop, I'll look stupid but I won't care because I'll feel fucking liberated. But I cannot make my head bend reality so as to ignore the fact that retaining staff while taking a consistent yearly intake is a net gain.

You could look at your own personal finances the same way. If you earn £30,000 a year, and you spend £20,000 of it on living expenses, then you are left with £10,000 saved each year. If you find a way to cut down your living expenses to £18,000, then each year you save £12,000 instead. Your gran dies and you get a windfall of £30,000 on top of that. So after 10 years, you have saved £50,000 more than what you would have estimated to have saved before you cut your expenses down and received your inheritance. What you guys are trying to claim, is that the extra £20,000 saved through cutting down your expenses, because it's technically retention, somehow doesn't actually count.

Me, Channel 4's fact check site, this fullfact charity, and even the guardian, it seems - we all had that knock apparently. They're not replacing people as they go, they're getting a yearly intake no matter what, from graduates or whatever other normal intake channels exist. Every year, 15,000 people graduate into the nursing system and that number remains, I assume, fairly consistent. These people fill positions that are being vacated. In theory, they're meant to keep the number static at 280,000 overall nurses. EDIT - forget the bit about the shortfall which I just edited out, it's referring to a different thing. What the Tories are claiming, is that the 15,000 ever year will continue. 18,500 people over the next ten years will be persuaded to stay compared to current levels of departure (as in, if 15,000 people a year leave right now, it means that all 15,000 new recruits are used up replacing them - so therefore, if they reduce that number to 10,000, they are in effect increasing the yearly number of nurses by +5,000). And 31,000 additional nurses will be found somehow.

Net increase of 1.

Only if Ashley then replaces him anyway, is it the same.

Can you just explain why maintaining normal recruiting levels that are, at present, presumably intended to replace departure levels - and then lowering those departure levels - does not result in a net increase?

What does that add to the conversation? Yes, that's great. Whatever we do now would keep going at the current levels to offset the current departures and keep the number static. They find some way of hiring an additional 31,000 on top of this, and they also stop 18,500 people from leaving. It's net 50,000. It just is. I'm sorry like, but it fucking is.

Apparently the NHS released a long term plan in January of 2019 that claims the following: The NHS’s Long Term Plan, released in January this year, already contains a commitment to improve “staff retention by at least 2 per cent by 2025, the equivalent of 12,400 additional nurses”. Curiously, they are viewing an increase in retention as being equivalent to an additional 12,400 nurses. As an aside, this suggests to me that the Tories have simply inflated this number a bit and claimed it was all their idea - but still, it is again supporting what I'm saying. This is painful lads, I don't at all get why none of you are understanding that if we hire a fixed number of new nurses over a period as part of the normal recruitment and training within the industry and accept (as Renton says) that the ideal is for this number to keep the overall tally static - but then choose to hang on to 18,500 who would otherwise have left by improving working conditions - that we overall get net 18,500 more. They've even given an actual set of numbers. We have 280,000 nurses in total atm and they've claimed that by 2030 it will be 330,000. So that is them confirming that they will create 50,000 more posts. Whether they're capable of filling them is entirely irrelevant, they're being created.

You are saying here that if no policy action was taken, those 19,000 nurses would be replaced. I agree. How would they be replaced? My assumption is that most of the influx of new NHS nurses comes from university graduations. So that number remains reasonably constant and we take all of them in year on year as normal. Apparently that number is about 15,000. If we persuade these 19,000 to stay, and still keep hiring 15,000 each year, what happens to the overall number?

I didn't give this post enough attention in the swirl there - ok so you're agreeing with the logic of 50,000 more nurses than projected which was my original point. Thank you for being the only person who understood that at least. Unfortunately I appear to now be arguing that it's still a net 50k increase though because that appears to be the point that is being supported elsewhere

This is from the link I put up that I'm not sure anyone bothered reading: The Conservatives say they want 50,000 more nurses in the NHS by 2024/25. These aren't all "new" nurses as the figure includes successfully encouraging nearly 19,000 existing nurses to stay. Around 31,000 will be newly trained or recruited. So that’s 50,000 more nurses working in the NHS compared to if no policy action was taken. Whether or not this is accurate depends on whether the target is met, and that needs to be backed up by policy action. As we've fact checked already, the Conservatives' manifesto doesn't account for the full cost of eventually employing 50,000 more nurses in the NHS.

But that's not what the reality is ffs man. You grasped this with your numbers post and have since let it go again. What was all that about 31,000 including the 19,000 retained, and so by implication 12k new recruits? Have you read that link in the post you quoted? Are they wrong as well? Renton is right about the NHS keeping the number static and that's what none of you, perversely, are appreciating. If the number is static now, and the Tories create 50,000 posts, it is logically acceptable that this can be achieved by recruiting 31,000 new nurses, and holding onto 18,500 who were expected to leave. Weirdly what that actually means is that it will be 50,000 new nurses of a sort, because the implication is that the people who would replace the 18,500 who will be retained, will be hired anyway. But they'll be hired as part of the normal ebb and flow of yearly recruitment, as part of a bigger number.

Here is an allegedly independent fact checking service supporting my view: https://fullfact.org/election-2019/50000-more-nurses-claim-conservative-manifesto-accurate/ I would dearly love to move past this but i have to understand it

Why are you dismissing the mitigation of departures? What ewerk says is feasible but he's just making the same argument I am but for a smaller number now. He's claiming that my maths is right in principle but that the Tories have lied about the 31,000 figure being "new". He appears to have agreed with the principle of retained staff forming part of the overall increase. I can understand that logically but I'm struggling with this notion that reducing 100,000 to 81,000 somehow isn't going to increase the total number left in the service if the 31,000 are indeed all new, which is all I seem to be able to find.

https://inews.co.uk/news/health/boris-johnson-admits-that-50000-more-nurses-pledge-only-refers-to-31000-new-nurses-1335650 This clearly says 31,000 new nurses with an additional 18,500 the government hopes to retain from the number of expected departures. The earlier article I posted supports that too... I cant see any evidence of your current claim?

Ah so THAT is the point. So instead of 50,000 being made up of 31k + 19k, they've established a number of 31k which includes 19k retained nurses. So they will only actually hire 12k nurses newly into the service. Correct? If so then I can finally see this, although this is literally the first time anyone anywhere has said that of the 31k, 19k are retained. I'm going to go looking for evidence of that.

Hang on. Imagine we have idk, 500,000 nurses in the system at the moment. Ever year, another 100,000 are added through standard recruitment. On top of that, based standard departures, 100,000 leave. So as things stand, the number is kept steady at 500,000. And for simplicity let's assume this all happens in just one year. If the Tories add another 31,000 additional over one year, then the number goes up to 531,000 additional nurses. If they improve their working conditions so that the departure number falls to 81,000... then the ultimate result is that we are left with 550,000 nurses, which is indeed 50,000 more. EDIT - 500,000 + 100,000 + 31,000 - 81,000 Why is that not the case?

God help me with this seriously, the pledge makes total sense to me. As I said right from the off, it's badly communicated because they're trying to get around explaining that they've been effectively forcing nurses to leave in the previous ten years - but she is 100% correct that there will be an increase in the overall number of nurses, by 50,000, by 2030 (assuming they manage to do what they said). Do you disagree with this?

Morgan doesn't say "new". She says an overall increase.

I guess no one is explaining how I'm wrong tonight then... I actually genuinely am curious but I'm starting to think that maybe in our desperation to see the Tories as perpetual liars about everything, we assumed they really were doing something as moronic as double counting nurses, instead of being functionally incapable of correctly articulating their policy. Well I'm not starting to think it tbh. Its exactly what i think, until someone actually explains otherwise, anyway. At which point I'll hold my hands up and admit I was wrong of course, not at all scared of doing that...

I didn't say that wasn't happening tbf, I made that clear in my first post. But do you think that they're double counting these 18,000 people?

Because those 18,000 are projected on current rates of departure to have been lost by the service over the next 10 years. So what they are saying is that they will put measures in place to stop those people leaving by improving working conditions. Therefore they have looked at current projections for the number of nurses left in the service by 2030 if they do nothing, and put a package together to ensure that we will actually have 50,000 more than that. This is actually really simple and if the issue is that people don't understand this then I'm at a loss really. Some people seem to think they've just flat out double counted 18,000 people. They haven't. There's a rationale behind their numbers. This is a fairly standard business consideration. If i have workflow throughput of 1000 products, and 900 come out the other end with 100 lost in the process, and then improve that process so that only 50 are lost, I have boosted my projected number of products outputted by 50.