With the 2015 General Election just a couple of weeks away, the NHS has been receiving a lot of media coverage, with all the main political parties vying for voters’ attention through their manifesto promises. Whether they will be fulfilled, however, is another matter altogether. The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, has promised to pump extra funds into training an additional 1,000 nurses by the end of 2015.

Universities will be asked to provide extra places for nursing students, with the ultimate aim of training a further 20,000 by 2020. The Labour party say that 30,000 nurses were unable to undertake training because of insufficient places on university courses.

To help fund the recruitment and training of these additional nurses, it plans to increase the annual funding of the NHS by 4% each year – a significant increase of around 1%. The additional funds would come from the Labour party’s manifesto promises of increasing taxes on tobacco, as well as the controversial ‘mansion tax’.