Around 15-newly qualified nurses at a Black Country hospital have been told they will have to compete with 50 others for just a dozen part-time jobs.The auxiliary nurses were seconded from Dudley’s Russells Hall Hospital for training to become fully-qualified and earn a promotion three years ago and say they feel “cheated” that they are not guaranteed a job.

Hospital bosses say scores of vacancies were available when the nurses started their training, but that they now cannot offer any permanent posts because of drastic changes in the staffing market.

The nurses believed they would have guaranteed full-time positions at the end of their training next month, and say that they should have preference over the 50 other freshly-qualified student nurses who had never worked in a hospital before.

But with just 12 positions of 18 and a half hours each week available, the nurses say they feel they have wasted three years. They say they have 100 years experience of hospital working between them.

One nurse who asked not to be named, and has around 15 years experience at Russells Hall Hospital, said she was “gutted”.

“If we’d known there would be no full time jobs at all on offer, then we wouldn’t have bothered,” she said.

“We’ve worked here for years already and wanted to better ourselves, so decided to do the training. Most of us have families, so even if we get one of the jobs on offer, it’s just not going to be enough.”

She said the group of fifteen had signed a contract committing themselves to working for the NHS for two years upon completion of their training at Wolverhampton University.

“We made a commitment to the NHS, but there doesn’t seem to be any commitment to us,” she said.

Dudley Group of Hospitals chief executive Paul Farenden said: “The position now is that we have very few vacancies and we do not guarantee permanent posts at the end of training.”