Britain plugs hospital nursing gaps with international staff amid WHO concern

Britain recruited a record number of international nurses in the last financial year to plug hospital staffing shortages, with as many as 10% coming from so-called “red-list” countries where health staff should not be actively recruited.

Britain has long hired from abroad to staff its state-run National Health Service (NHS), and its vote to leave the EU in 2016 meant the number of EU staff has dropped sharply.

In the year to March, nearly half of the 52,148 nurses, midwives and nursing associates who joined the British register were internationally educated, according to the Nursing and Midwifery Council.

Nearly 3,500 came from Nigeria, which is on the WHO’s safeguards list.

The two biggest contributors to Britain’s nursing workforce — India and the Philippines — are not on the red-list.

The WHO has warned that poorer countries are increasingly losing healthcare workers to wealthier countries, and has flagged concern over active recruitment in some countries.

Jim Buchan, senior fellow at the Health Foundation, said the numbers arriving in Britain from red-list countries, notably Nigeria and Ghana, had gone up markedly.

“The requirement of WHO member states is not to actively recruit from these countries, but what the data can’t tell us is how these nurses have come to be on the UK register.”

Caroline Waterfield, director of development and employment at NHS Employers, said hospital trusts and others who hired staff in England’s NHS had been told to work only with agencies that were accredited, vetted and not operating in red-list countries.

The rules do not stop individuals in red-list countries applying for jobs in Britain.

Paul Wanyonyi Simiyu is a nurse from Kenya who came to Britain four years ago. Kenya is on Britain’s “amber” list, meaning any active nurse recruitment has to be through a bilateral agreement Britain has with Kenya.

Despite that, Simiyu estimates 90% of the recruitment of Kenyan nurses comes via direct applications to UK jobs.

He founded KenyanNurse to train Kenyan nurses for English exams and advise them on processing registrations.

“It’s not against any international or national laws for me to tell a friend or anyone else, hey, there’s a job somewhere overseas,” he said.

On Friday, Britain announced £15m (R358m) in funding to strengthen the health workforce in Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana.

Britain’s health service pledged in 2019 to have 50,000 more nurses in the NHS in England by next year.

The Health Foundation estimates that NHS England has 43,000 nursing vacancies.

Buchan said the lower numbers of EU staff and domestic shortages meant further nonEU recruits would be needed to hit the target. —