Trainee nurses who graduate this summer have been told there are no jobs for them at the Royal Bolton Hospital. A group of 41 nursing students have worked for free on the wards of the hospital for the last 18 months. They had been assigned to the hospital as part of their course at Salford Universary and would normally expect to be taken on full time in Bolton at the end of the course.

But at a meeting called by senior figures at the cash-strapped Bolton NHS Trust, the nurses who have cost £1.5 million to train were told there is a nursing recruitment freeze in place, and none of them will be offered work.