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Three thousand more nurses left the NHS than joined it last year - by far the biggest gap in five years.

The 33,000 who walked away - more than half of them under 40 - are enough nurses to fill 20 hospital trusts, horrifying figures gathered by the BBC show.

It undermines Theresa May's insistence that there are "more nurses" in the NHS since 2010 and her ministers' claims there is "more money than ever".

And it comes after a winter crisis that saw 55,000 operations delayed and thousands of people waiting in ambulances for more than an hour outside A&E.

Royal College of Nursing head Janet Davies said nurses "find it impossible to do their job" and in one shocking e-mail, a ward sister warned she was starting to see echoes of the Mid Staffs scandal in her hospital.

(Image: PA)

She told the BBC: "The government must lift the NHS out of this dangerous and downward spiral.

"We are haemorrhaging nurses at precisely the time when demand has never been higher.

"The next generation of British nurses aren't coming through just as the most experienced nurses are becoming demoralised and leaving."

The figures, provided by NHS Digital for the year ending September 2017, show 17,207 of the nurses who left were under 40.

Just 6,796 were aged over 55, while 9,437 were aged 40 to 54, the BBC reported.

The Department of Health and Social Care insisted the number of nurses in the NHS has risen overall since 2010.

But critics say the workforce has grown far slower than rising demand.