{"id":18235,"date":"2023-01-19T12:41:21","date_gmt":"2023-01-19T12:41:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.adzuna.co.uk\/blog\/?p=18235"},"modified":"2023-10-26T15:25:03","modified_gmt":"2023-10-26T15:25:03","slug":"nursing-strikes-and-an-occupational-deep-dive-using-our-adzuna-intelligence-portal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adzuna.co.uk\/blog\/nursing-strikes-and-an-occupational-deep-dive-using-our-adzuna-intelligence-portal\/","title":{"rendered":"Nursing strikes and an occupational deep-dive using our Adzuna Intelligence Portal"},"content":{"rendered":"

In November, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) <\/span>announced<\/span><\/a> its first ever industrial action, which took place on the 15<\/span>th<\/span> and 20<\/span>th<\/span> of December with new dates announced in January this year. Of all the groups that have taken part in the wave of industrial action across recent months, Nurses have the <\/span>most support amongst the British public<\/span><\/a>, with 45% strongly supporting their strike and 21% somewhat supporting it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The RCN are asking for a 19% pay rise, with low pay being blamed for a chronic shortage of staff, meaning staff are overworked and stretched thin, putting the health of patients at risk. The government says this is unaffordable.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

However, nurses’ pay has fallen in real terms (accounting for inflation \u2013 as prices rise, wages need to also rise at the same pace to \u2018stand still\u2019) by more than 10% since 2010, which has become even more pressing during the cost-of-living crisis. Weak real pay growth is a common trend across the economy, especially in the public sector \u2013 with regular pay (excluding things like bonuses and overtime) in the private sector rising by 7.0% year on year and pay in the public sector up by 3.9% (ONS Monthly Wages and Salaries Survey).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The inability of nurses’ pay to keep up with the increasing cost-of-living is likely behind the recent <\/span>anecdotal <\/span>evidence <\/span>of nurses leaving the sector for better paid jobs in hospitality and retail<\/span>. Low pay will be contributing to the very high levels of vacancies that we are seeing in public services, and to recruitment and retention challenges more broadly.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To gain further insights into unmet labour demand in the nursing profession as well as the healthcare sector more broadly, our proprietary dashboard, Adzuna Intelligence<\/a>, displays a wide range of aggregate statistics based on all the vacancy listings we hold on our site. This allows us to look at our data by occupation, sector, industry and skills across geographic areas at various levels.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Across the past 6 months, there were 337,000 vacancies within the human health and social work industry. The top occupation in demand within the industry was social care workers (the top occupation in demand across all industries) with 267,000 listings. General Nurse has the third most listings within the industry, at 85,000, 8<\/span>th<\/span> overall for all occupations. The pay distribution of vacancies over the past 6 months shows that salaries for general nurses are largely bunched between \u00a330,000 and \u00a340,000.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Below is listed the total demand and median salary for some specialist types of nurses over the past 6 months:<\/span><\/p>\n