Nkem

I always knew I wanted to be a nurse. Growing up in Homerton, watching my mum come home from her night shifts cleaning offices, her hands raw from chemicals, I saw what happened when people could not get the healthcare they needed when they needed it. My dad drove buses for Transport for London, and between them they worked every hour they could find to keep us housed and fed in a neighbourhood where a GP appointment took weeks to get. At sixteen, I decided I would be the nurse our community needed.

In 2019, I applied to City, University of London for their nursing degree. The admissions tutor was delighted when I walked into the interview. "We have hundreds of unfilled places," she told me. "Health Education England has increased the number of training spots because the NHS needs more nurses. You'll have no trouble getting in." I was accepted immediately, started my degree that September, and threw myself into the work. I studied every evening after shifts at a local care home, where I earned just enough to cover my rent and travel. The residents there became like grandparents to me, teaching me that good nursing was about seeing the whole person, not just their symptoms.

I graduated with honours in 2022, my parents crying with pride as I walked across the stage. Everything I had worked for was finally within reach. I applied to Homerton University Hospital first, the same hospital where I had been born, where my family went when they were sick. I wanted to give back to the community that had raised me.

The HR manager was apologetic but firm. "I'm sorry," she said, looking down at her paperwork. "We have no funded training posts available. The budget's been cut. Health Education England has reduced our allocation this year." She could see my confusion. "You're qualified, that's not the issue. It's just that we don't have the funding to bring you on as a trainee nurse."

I thought it must be specific to Homerton, maybe they were having local difficulties. I applied to Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, thinking a bigger teaching hospital would have more opportunities. Same response: no funded training posts. Then University College London Hospitals. Same again. St Bartholomew's Hospital. The answer was always the same. "There is no funding."

At first, this sounded reasonable. Everyone was talking about tight budgets, the aftermath of the pandemic, difficult decisions. I accepted it because everyone else seemed to accept it. I took a job as a healthcare assistant at Homerton instead, thinking I would wait it out, that something would open up.

But working on the wards, I saw something that did not fit the story I had been told. We were desperately short of qualified nurses. Every shift, we were running with skeleton crews. Nurses were leaving for private agencies because the workload was unsustainable. Patients waited longer for basic care. The ward managers were pulling their hair out trying to fill rotas. I watched qualified nurses work double shifts just to keep the wards functioning, and I knew I could help if someone would just give me the training post I needed.

Six months later, I was walking past City, University of London after visiting a friend in the area. Outside the nursing department, there was a big banner advertising for student applications. "Train to be the nurse the NHS needs," it read. "Hundreds of places available." I stopped dead in the street. The same admissions tutor who had welcomed me three years earlier was giving a presentation to prospective students about all the available training places.

I went in and waited until she was free. "Why are you still recruiting students when graduates like me can't find funded posts?" I asked her. She looked genuinely uncomfortable. "That's not our department," she said. "We just fill the places we're allocated by Health Education England. What happens after graduation, that's between you and the trusts."

That was when I understood. The system was training nurses it had no intention of employing. The university was taking tuition fees and filling training places because Health Education England told them to recruit. The hospitals were turning away qualified graduates because Health Education England told them they had no funded posts. In between, hundreds of nurses like me were stuck, qualified but unable to work in the jobs we had trained for, while the wards we wanted to serve remained understaffed.

I started asking different questions. If the people existed – and we did, I had met dozens of other nursing graduates in the same situation – and if the need existed – and it clearly did, you only had to walk through any ward to see that – then what exactly was it that "there was no money" for? The government that issues the pound was choosing not to spend the pounds that would connect qualified nurses to understaffed wards.

I used to accept the excuse that "there was no money." I hear it differently now. The government that prints the notes and mints the coins told me it could not find enough of them to train the people who were standing right there, ready to work in hospitals that desperately needed them. The real question was never about money. It was about whether the people existed, whether the skills could be taught, whether the wards needed staffing. They were. All of them.

The excuse was not a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. It is the same logic as a household that says "we cannot afford it," except a household does not issue its own currency. The government does. The limit was never the money. The limit was the willingness to spend it into the places and the people who needed it.

I am still here, still working as a healthcare assistant, still watching qualified nurses burn out while trained graduates like me wait for funded posts that may never come. But I understand now that this is not just my story. It is the story of every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare. The resources existed. The people existed. The decision not to connect them was political, not financial.