NHS at risk as Brexit worries EU medics
The state-run health service is hugely reliant on immigrants to look after ageing Britons
With British hospitals already struggling to fill their ranks, Brexit could make life even harder for the National Health Service (NHS) as EU doctors and nurses either stay away or prepare to leave.
The state-run NHS is hugely reliant on EU immigrants to look after ageing Britons, and the latest data after Brexit has put the sector on high alert.
“We risk facing a serious staff shortage which will only further worsen pressures on our NHS,” Charlie Massey, head of the General Medical Council (GMC), told a parliamentary committee last month. Some 60,000 EU nationals work in the NHS, representing about 5 per cent of its staff of 1.2 million.
A survey commissioned by Channel 4, published on March 13, showed that 42 per cent of them were considering leaving in the next five years, and that 70 per cent considered Britain a less appealing place to work in the wake of the referendum.
The number of EU nurses registering to work in the NHS has already plunged by 90 per cent since Britain voted to leave the European Union in June, according to figures from the Nursing and Midwifery Council. Only 101 nurses signed up in December, compared with 1,304 in July, in what Jackie Smith, the council’s chief executive, called “the first sign of a change” after the referendum.
Janet Davies, director of the Royal College of Nursing, said the NHS already had 24,000 nursing vacancies and that it “simply could not cope without the contribution from EU nurses”.