Almost 9,000 foreign nurses a year are leaving the UK to work abroad, amid a sudden surge in nurses quitting the already understaffed NHS for better-paid jobs elsewhere.
The rise in nurses originally from outside the EU moving to take up new posts abroad has prompted concerns that Britain is increasingly becoming “a staging post” in their careers.
The number of UK-registered nurses moving to other countries doubled in just one year between 2021-22 and 2022-23 to a record 12,400 and has soared fourfold since before the coronavirus pandemic.
Seven out of 10 of those leaving last year – 8,680 – qualified as a nurse somewhere other than the UK or EU, often in India or the Philippines. Many had worked in Britain for up to three years, according to research from the Health Foundation.
The vast majority of those quitting are heading to the US, New Zealand or Australia, where nurses are paid much more than in the UK – sometimes up to almost double.
Experts have voiced their alarm about the findings and said the NHS across the UK, already struggling with about 40,000 vacancies for nurses and hugely reliant on those coming from abroad, is increasingly losing out in the global recruitment race.
“It feels like the NHS is falling down the league table as a destination of choice for overseas nurses,” said Dame Anne Marie Rafferty, a professor of nursing studies at King’s College London.
“Worryingly, it feels as if the UK is perceived not as a high- but middle-income country in pay terms and as a staging post where nurses from overseas can acclimatise to western-type health systems in the search for better pay and conditions.”
Source: The Guardian, 25 March 2024
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