Fifth of NHS staff are not from the UK

A FIFTH of NHS staff in England are foreign nationals, according to estimates. The record total includes three in ten nurses and more than a third of doctors being non-UK residents.

Health chiefs have warned that overseas recruitment cannot fill vacancies for ever, adding that the figures reflect how the NHS depends on international staff to stop it ‘buckling under pressure’.

This comes as a Mail on Sunday investigation revealed that NHS staff at every level are working remotely in countries such as Australia and Japan.

Critics have warned that letting staff do this puts patients’ lives at risk.

At least 335 staff from 33 trusts have been able to work from

‘No room for complacency’

overseas in the past two years, including consultants who can earn a basic salary of up to £126,000.

The latest figures from NHS Digital, recorded last September, reveal that a third of the 335,763 full-time equivalent (FTE) nurses and health visitors in England were foreign nationals.

This is up from the figure from three years earlier, which revealed two in ten staff were non- UK residents. It also marks the highest proportion of foreign nationals in the NHS since current records began in 2009.

Some 214 nationalities are now represented in the NHS workforce.

Indians lead the figures, making up 10.1 per cent of all FTE nurses and health visitors, followed by Filipinos, Nigerians and Irish.

There has been a similarly sharp rise in the proportion of non-UK hospital and community health service doctors to more than a third of the total. Indian was also the most common nationality, at 8 per cent of all doctors, followed by Pakistani, Egyptian and Nigerian.

Danny Mortimer, chief executive of NHS Employers, said that without international workers the health service ‘could have very easily buckled under pressures’ such as Covid.

He warned: ‘There is no room for complacency, as we will not be able to continue to draw on international recruitment for ever.’ He said that keeping staff is also vital.

A Department of Health spokesman said a £2.4 billion long-term workforce plan will boost the number of UK staff and cut the number of international workers to 10 per cent by 2038.