Post-Brexit reliance on NHS staff from ‘red list’ countries is unethical, Streeting says

Brexit has left the NHS increasingly dependent on doctors and nurses from poor “red list” countries, from which the World Health Organization says it is wrong to recruit.

The health service in England has hired tens of thousands of health staff from countries such as Nigeria, Ghana and Zimbabwe since the UK left the EU single market at the end of 2020.

A post-Brexit surge in the number of health professionals from red list countries working in England has sparked criticism that hiring so many is “unethical” and “immoral”, and will damage those countries’ health systems.

The big jump means the NHS now employs 65,610 staff from the WHO’s 55 red list countries in its 1.5 million-strong workforce. It has taken on 32,935 of those since the start of 2021, including 20,665 who joined in the 20 months between March 2023 and November 2024 alone, according to NHS figures obtained by the Nuffield Trust health thinktank.

Mark Dayan, a policy analyst at the thinktank and Brexit programme lead, said: “Recruiting on this scale, from countries the World Health Organization believe have troublingly few staff, is difficult to justify ethically for a still much wealthier country.

“Yet again, British failure to train enough healthcare staff has been bailed out by those trained overseas.”

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Source: The Guardian, 21 March 2025