Here’s how Brexit can save the NHS
ne of the most plaintive bleats about Brexit is that it puts the NHS at risk. Thousands of staff from other EU countries might decide to lay down their stethoscopes and go home, and where would that leave the sick and the injured? Corroborating evidence for this view emerged this week with the news that European nurses are abandoning the NHS. There has been a reported 96 per cent fall in post-referendum arrivals. Last July, 1,304 nurses from Europe joined The Nursing and Midwifery Council. By April, that number was pretty much down to Magda from Riga. Cue claims the health service is headed for “the worst nursing crisis in 20 years”. This is invaluable ammunition for Remainers, who are ignoring the fact 69 per cent of Britons now say they are eager to get on with leaving the EU.
So, what is the truth? Well, you could point out that tougher language tests for nurses from Europe have been introduced and it may well be this, not the referendum result, that has caused a decline in candidates. Is that such a bad thing? If Magda from Riga can’t read the drugs regimen then you don’t really want her looking after your dad, do you? Only recently, we heard the bonkers story of one Polish nurse who was using Google Translate to interact with her elderly charges.
And, unless I’m much mistaken, the UK had nurses before we joined the Common Market. Two of my aunts were among the exceptionally well-trained staff who looked after patients and kept wards spotless back when you could eat your lunch off a Dettol-scourged hospital floor. British nursing was celebrated around the world. You don’t need to be a senior physician to diagnose what went wrong. The NHS became overdependent on foreign staff. This suited successive governments which saved money because they didn’t have to train our own young people.
What a cynical miscalculation that was. I have lost count of the number of emails I have had from readers whose children and grandchildren are desperate to be doctors or nurses, and who have worked incredibly hard to get all the necessary exam results but simply can’t find a training place. The UK employs a much higher proportion of foreign-trained doctors than any other European country, except Ireland. In Germany, just 4.9 per cent of doctors are foreign-trained; in Britain it’s around 37 per cent.
Furthermore, The Labour Force Survey shows that almost a third of medical practitioners and almost a fifth of nurses, dentists and pharmacists were born outside the European Economic Area. In the decade to 2008, a staggering 57 per cent of doctors registering to practice with the General Medical Council had qualified outside the UK. Some 6,000 foreign doctors registered to practise in the UK last year, despite the fact those who trained overseas are at least three times more likely to be the subject of a clinical issue case than those who qualified in the UK.
Don’t get me wrong. Many foreign medical staff are an enormous asset to this country. I think, in particular, of the Pakistani-born surgeon who operated on a dear friend, and of the German physiotherapist who helped me only last week with a journalism-related injury. (It’s not only war correspondents who put themselves on the line, Marjorie.)
Still, it’s clear that young Britons have been badly let down. Medicine is a fantastic career but by relying on foreign labour we have shut out our own. A recent report revealed the farcical situation whereby thousands of straight-a British students were being denied the chance to train as doctors, despite a “crippling” national shortage of medics. According to university applications body UCAS, one in five straight-a students failed in their application to study at a British medical school last year. As a leading businessman said witheringly to me of his brilliant son: “Alex almost didn’t get a [medical] place because he’s not foreign or disadvantaged enough.”
Kids like Alex are unfairly rejected because of a government quota system that admits high-paying foreign students at the expense of native applicants. The Government says it takes £230,000 to fully train each doctor in the UK because of the higher costs of delivering medical education. The number of places available is capped to save money while holes in the NHS are filled by foreign doctors and nurses who, some feel, are trained on the cheap and to a lesser standard.
What brought us to this? Don’t get me started on George Osborne’s cretinous decision, in 2015, to scrap nurse-training bursaries. The then-chancellor’s idea was to make would-be nurses pay for their training – even though they were working a 37.5-hour week on eight-to-12 week placements without pay, and so were unable to take on part-time paying jobs. Is anyone really surprised that applications fell by 23 per cent? How’s this for an enticing recruitment ad: “Thinking of a career in nursing? Come and work all hours free of charge for the NHS and get into £50,000 of debt before being paid peanuts!”
As we saw with brutal clarity last Thursday, young people are not inclined to vote Conservative. Who can blame them? To save money, successive governments failed to train enough home-grown doctors and nurses at a time of growing demand. Talk about false economy. Not only did they deprive the NHS of high-quality, English-speaking staff, they also denied thousands of hard-working British teenagers the chance to have a fulfilling and socially useful career. It’s enough to make you sick.
Can I suggest restoring nursing bursaries at the earliest opportunity, and lifting the cap on the total number of training places for doctors in British medical schools? Our national health depends on it.
The UK had nurses before we joined the Common Market – they were celebrated