The Nursing Times is running a campaign about what I would probably call post registration education but which they call Training. The online report goes like this:

NT is running a major campaign, Time Out For Training (TOFT), to help ensure nurses receive the training they deserve. Over the next six months NT will be encouraging you to get involved in this important campaign. So what’s it all about?

As exclusively revealed in NT, more than half of nurses who responded to our recent survey believe they are receiving inadequate levels of training (see link to news story).

The situation is so severe that one in ten nurses say they want to quit the profession over the issue, with two-thirds receiving less than ten days training in the last 12 months.

The lack of commitment to post-registration education is a direct result of strategic health authorities using training budgets to balance their books – a trend which began in 2005.

With future career development and patient safety both in jeopardy, TOFT aims to:

• Persuade trusts to guarantee sufficient training time and staff back-fill is set aside to maintain career progression and patient safety
• Put pressure on the government to bring back ring-fencing of training budgets
• Persuade SHAs to guarantee that training funds are spent solely on that purpose

TOFT will run both in NT and on nursingtimes.net, with regular progress updates.

So what can you do to help us help you? NT will encourage you to sign an online petition and send a letter to your trust asking for a training time guarantee. We will also be encouraging you to share your experiences to expose those making access to post-registration training an impossibility.

Starting with an overview of the current training situation (link to first feature), NT has lined up a series of in-depth features looking at how the situation has hit the profession.

Together we can restore nurse training to a level that ensures safe practice and secure career development.

It is vital for nursing that we do so.

I agree whole heartedly with the spirit of what Nursing Times is trying to do, but my feeling is that they are missing some important tricks here. Firstly the situation is more complex than they mention; The SHA’s really did ’steal’ money which was meant to be ring fenced for the education of non medical practitioners (the money is not just for nurses), but the fact is that many trusts were in dire financial straights and as a direct result applied vacancy freezes. This meant that not only was there less money available but also that there were less people around who could be released for education purposes. This year, there is plenty of money available for courses but it has taken most of this financial year to get staffing back to any kind of normality and so problems do remain.

My second issue relates to the idea that ‘training’ only takes place outside of the workplace, when actually I would like to controversially suggest that it can take place from within and that academic courses don’t necessarily help with the learning of practical skills. Which leads me to ask what NT mean by training? In my mind a dog is trained to walk to heel or to jump through hoops (as per the picture above), and I guess if you are being pedantic a nurse could be trained to for example take blood or give an intravenous drug. This is because both are practical skills requiring some theory but mostly practice with appropriate supervision. If NT mean courses of the kind that add theory and allow application of that theory to practice then I don’t actually call that training, I call that education. The difference in funding terms between training and education is that training should be provided and funded by employers and should continue whatever the level of staffing and financial position because whether there are currently 5 or 25 nurses in a team then they all need to be competent to do their job. Education on the other hand is something that is desirable, and in some cases necessary for the job but requires nurses to be prepared to take some responsibility rather than act as a passive partner. Not everyone can afford to self fund and if SHAs put money aside for education then that is what is should be used for but actually NT does nurses no favour by encouraging the idea that education of this kind is a right, is something to be provided for you and is something that everyone should be able to access whatever the other issues that surround you.

As nurses, at whatever level you work, you need political awareness. You need to be able to recognise the difference between education and training, and sadly you are not going to find that out from the nursing times campaign!