NURSES are being forced to leave the profession because they cannot afford to buy a home, a new report calling for ministers to give health workers a decent wage has warned. 

In the past decade, house prices have increased six times faster than nurses’ wages, making their chances of getting on the property ladder “almost inconceivable,” researchers found. 

Nurses’ union RCN, which commissioned the report by London Economic, said that the 1 per cent pay “insult” offered by the government “won’t come close to remedying the suppression of nursing salaries over the past 10 years.”