Remarks made by HRH The Prince of Wales at The Royal Glamorgan Hospital to launch the Royal College of Nursing Prince of Wales Nursing Cadet Scheme

Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m pleased to be here finally to launch this Cadet Scheme, which has been in the planning and the discussion for quite some time. I’m enormously grateful to Dame Donna Kinnair and the Royal College of Nursing for all the effort and endless work they have put into establishing it. I’m enormously proud to have myself associated with The Prince of Wales Nursing Cadet Scheme and hearing about the plans to expand it is enormously encouraging. And, if I may say so, it is wonderful to see that so many of you already have applied and are interested in doing this particular scheme. I hope, as Dame Donna was saying, that you will discover all sorts of new opportunities and expertise and as she would say, as I’m getting rapidly older, I have also got an interest in investing in all the future skills that we need in this country for nursing generally. So you are going to be the pioneers for all this. I am enormously grateful to you and I shall look forward to see how it develops and hearing back, certainly hearing the feedback from some of you at least as to how you feel it has been going. Whatever the case, I’m sure you will be the leaders and I hope we should be able to form an alumnae association which shall grow and grow and make an enormous difference to the National Health Service of this country. So well done all of you and I look forward to hearing the results.