Our reliance on foreign nurses is biggest threat to NHS, say Lords

THE NHS is ‘ too reliant’ on foreign staff and has failed to train enough British doctors and nurses, peers warned last night.

Ministers have no strategy to ensure the health service will have the workers it needs over the coming decades, a Lords committee said.

They say this failure is the ‘biggest internal threat to the sustainability of the NHS’.

Peers said Britain could not continue to rely on overseas health and social care workers after it leaves the EU, when tougher immigration controls are expected to be put in place.

In a highly-critical report, the Lords committee on the longterm sustainability of the NHS said the NHS is now in ‘crisis’ adding that the social care system is on the ‘brink of collapse’. They recommend that:

The NHS should consider employing GPs directly because the current situation where they are self-employed is ‘not fit for purpose’;

Spending on the health service and social care must rise in line with national income until at least 2030 to keep it afloat;

A nationwide obesity campaign is needed to tell people it is their responsibility to look after their own health;

Ministers should consider forcing the middle-aged to pay into a German- style compulsory insurance scheme to pay for their care in old age.

The committee is chaired by Lord Patel, a crossbench peer and eminent obstetrician. His report said: ‘We are concerned by the absence of any comprehensive national long- term strategy to secure the appropriately skilled, well-trained and committed workforce that the health and care system will need over the next ten to 15 years. In our view this represents the biggest internal threat to the sustainability of the NHS. The report went on: ‘Workforce strategy has been poor with too much reliance on overseas recruitment. Our conclusion could not be clearer. Is it sustainable as it is today? No, it is not. Things need to change.’

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt admitted: ‘I would say that workforce planning is an area where we have failed, and successive Governments have failed, to get this right. Brexit will be a catalyst to get this right, because we are going to be standing on our own two feet and we will have to start thinking much harder without the automatic access to the European labour pool that we have taken for granted for many years. That is an area where we need to be much more strategic than we have been.’

A Department of Health spokesman said: ‘We are already expanding the number of medical training places by 25 per cent to ensure we have all the doctors we need, investing in social care and working on a long-term funding solution.’