Concerns have grown over NHS staffing in England as workforce figures show the health service may be becoming over-reliant on recruits from abroad.
Figures from NHS Digital show the share of healthcare staff recruited from overseas almost doubled between 2014 and 2021, according to analysis by the BBC. According to the analysis, 34% of doctors joining the NHS in 2021 came from overseas – a rise of 18% since 2014.
Meanwhile, the share of doctors recruited from outside the UK and EU rose from 18% to 34% and the share of nurses rose from 7% to 34%. The BBC also found the share of UK doctors joining the health service had fallen from 69% in 2015 to 58% in 2021, while the share of new UK nurses fell from 74% to 61% in the same period.
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On Friday (August 5), several organisations issued fresh calls for the Government to tackle the staffing crisis. Dr Kitty Mohan, chair of the international committee at the British Medical Society, said the analysis showed the NHS has “grown heavily reliant” on doctors from overseas.
She said: “This was evidenced during the pandemic as international doctors were front and centre of the battle on the NHS frontline. The simple fact is we do not have enough doctors, nurses and other healthcare staff to meet the growing and increasingly complex healthcare needs of our population.”
Dr Mohan also cited a range of reasons why doctors are cutting their hours or planning to leave the NHS, including years of pay erosion, punishing workloads, restrictive immigration rules, and verbal and physical abuse. She called for the Government and NHS England to publish a transparent, publicly available long-term workforce plan as soon as possible.
Danny Mortimer, chief executive of NHS Employers, said international recruits are “an important component of the NHS workforce” but called for “urgent action” from the Government to tackle “chronic staff shortages in the longer term.”
He said: “We recognise and highly value the contribution our overseas staff make to our teams and the care we provide to our patients. International recruitment should be seen as one part of a multistrand approach to workforce planning.
“While there is also a focus on growing and retaining the domestic workforce, we can’t escape the fact that there are 105,000 vacancies in the NHS and 165,000 vacancies in social care. We are in need of urgent action and the new prime minister must commit to publishing a fully costed and funded workforce plan.”
Patricia Marquis, Royal College of Nursing director for England, highlighted the fact 25,000 nurses had left the UK register in the last year due to “real terms pay cuts” and “limits on education funding.” She said the number of unfilled nursing positions in the NHS is “unsustainable.”
The PA news agency has contacted the Department of Health and Social Care for comment.
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