A year ago Anka Grigorescu had an endless stream of nurses from all around Romania beating a path to her door in Bucharest for a chance to go to work in the UK. The stream has dwindled to a trickle and now she has to aggressively seek nurses throughout Romania begging them to take a job in the NHS.
The recruiter says some are still willing. “But they are few and far between,” she told Felix Magazine by telephone from Bucharest. “Now I often have to spend a long time on the telephone painting a picture which I know isn’t strictly true,” she said. “If I was authorised, I would offer financial bribes to try to get them to accept.”
“When I started this job six years ago, I’d have a line of nurses outside my door, desperate to go to England.”
The sharp fall in the pound since last year’s Brexit vote, the erosion of NHS nurses’ pay by a seven-year pay cap, and the uncertainty about immigration rules after Brexit have all turned a once sought-after British nursing job into a hard sell, compounding the NHS’s desperate staff shortages.
The picture in Romania is matched by the stark figures on the numbers of EU nurses registering to work in the British system. Since the Brexit vote in June 2016 the flow of nurses from the European bloc has dropped by a staggering 96%.
Last July 1,304 EU nurses came to work in the UK but in April this year there were a mere 46, according to Nursing and Midwifery Council statistics.
The Health Foundation think tank, which obtained those figures from a Freedom of Information request, said there was a shortage of 30,000 in England alone. A spokesman for the think tank confirmed the figures to Felix. “They have dropped,” he said. “ It’s down to a combination of Brexit, the falling value of the pound and also the language tests that were put in place a year or so ago as well.”
While the Department of Health points to the fact that 52,000 future nurses are in training, the spokesman said it takes years to train a nurse once they come out of university. “If they are talking about 52,000 nurses in training some will qualify this year, some next year and some the year after depending how far along with their training they are.”
“There will, however, be natural retirement and a large number of nurses who leave the job before retirement for a variety of reasons. Retention is a big problem within the NHS. So those nurses in training will only fill in the losses to come.”
Too Many Gaps
Anita Charlesworth, the Health Foundation’s director of research and economics, said that without EU nurses “it will be even harder for the NHS and other employers to find the staff they need to provide safe patient care. The findings should be a wake-up call to politicians and health service leaders.”
The nurses’ union, the Royal College of Nursing, said there were 656,219 nurses on the British register in March 2017, of whom 5.5% (36,615) were from the EU or European Economic Area (EEA).
In recent years, NHS trusts have repeatedly turned to international recruitment to plug staffing gaps but the union says the government’s refusal to guarantee the status of EU nationals living in the UK is exacerbating shortages.
Prime Minister Theresa May has claimed Britain could not unilaterally guarantee EU citizens’ rights as doing so would weaken her hand in the Brexit negotiations.
Janet Davies, the general secretary of the RCN, said it was vital that EU staff were given assurances about their future.
“We rely on the contributions of EU staff and this drop in numbers could have severe consequences for patients and their families,” she said. “Our nursing workforce is in a state of crisis. Across our health service, from A&E to elderly care, this puts patients at serious risk.
by Bob Graham
The post NHS: Recruiting Nurses Getting Tougher Everyday appeared first on Felix Magazine.
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