Equal access to training for black and minority ethnic nurses

Black and minority ethnic young people are increasingly attracted to nursing. However, statistics published by the Nursing and Midwifery Admissions Service in 2005 suggest that black and ethnic minorities have less than half the chance of getting into a nursing school that white applicants have. This article examines the evidence of race inequality in access to nurse and midwifery training, a pattern that can be traced back nearly 20 years. It asks why this information seems to have generated less concern and less action than in medical schools when evidence of similar levels of unequal access to medical training came to light in the mid-1990s. The article also considers why nursing schools are able to deny access to their admissions statistics when the deans of the medical schools decided, in 1998, to put their admissions data into the public domain to improve their selection procedures.