Some ex nurses will have their retraining bill paid for

She said that �200,000 would go towards an advertising campaign to boost short term recruitment in over-stretched areas during the winter period.

A similar sum is to be spent creating 1,000 clinical leaders under a scheme operated by the Royal College of Nursing.

And a �100,000 grants scheme has been created to lure former nurses and midwives back into the NHS through cash for training and travel.

However, this will amount o just 100 new nurses.

In England all ex-nurses wishing to return to the profession can already train for free.

'Plan for the future'

Ms Deacon said: "There's no one single issue and no single investment that will ensure that we can attract people into NHS nursing and there's no one single issue that will ensure that we can keep them.

"What we must do on all NHS workforce issues is to plan now for the future.

We can achieve more by working together and by harnessing our energies and resources to take forward this work

Health Minister Susan Deacon

"Many of the issues we are addressing now are because of failures of previous governments to plan and we are not prepared to make the same mistakes."

The minister said it was important to bring together the 80 representatives from the NHS, unions, midwives groups, educational providers organisations and private sector agencies to discuss the ways forward.

She said: "The best way we can take those decisions is by bringing together those with a stake, those with an interest and those with an understanding of what needs to be done.

"This convention is not a talking shop. It must not be a talking shop.

'No short term fix'

"It's incumbent on everyone here to make sure there are tangible, practical outcomes from today's discussions and that we agree on priorities for the way forwards.

Susan Deacon: "Work together"

"We can achieve more by working together and by harnessing our energies and resources to take forward this work than if we are all sitting in different corners and having different analyses, different thoughts and ideas."

Marla Salmon, the dean of nursing at Emory University in Atlanta, US, said there was no short term fix for the nursing issue.

She added: "I think it's also in some sense a risky strategy to bring together the stakeholders.

"It's not something a lot of governments do because the risk lies in that it won't succeed, but this one, I think, will succeed and I'm pleased to be part of it."

Maintain momentum

According to the Scottish Executive there are 450 more qualified NHS nurses in Scotland now than there were in 1997, while 10,000 nurses and midwives will qualify north of the border over the next five years.

The Scottish National Party's health spokeswoman Nicola Sturgeon welcomed the new cash but called on the executive to set a target of recruiting 1,500 new nurses by 2003.

She claimed the latest figures from the Information and Statistics Division of the NHS showed there were 1,000 fewer nurses in Scottish hospitals than in 1996.

Ms Sturgeon said: "What is important now is that the momentum established by today's nursing convention is maintained and we are able to hold the government to account for the progress it makes."