Brexit has left the NHS more and more depending on docs and nurses from poor “red list” nations, from which the World Well being Group says it’s flawed to recruit.
The well being service in England has employed tens of 1000’s of well being workers from nations resembling Nigeria, Ghana and Zimbabwe for the reason that UK left the EU single market on the finish of 2020.
A post-Brexit surge within the variety of well being professionals from crimson record nations working in England has sparked criticism that hiring so many is “unethical” and “immoral”, and can harm these nations’ well being techniques.
The massive bounce means the NHS now employs 65,610 workers from the WHO’s 55 crimson record nations in its 1.5 million-strong workforce. It has taken on 32,935 of these for the reason that begin of 2021, together with 20,665 who joined within the 20 months between March 2023 and November 2024 alone, in response to NHS figures obtained by the Nuffield Belief well being thinktank.
The expansion in crimson list-origin workers has been so dramatic that one in 11 (9%) of all medics in England at the moment are from crimson record states, and two-thirds (46,890) of all of the nurses who started working within the UK between January 2021 and September 2024 had been educated outdoors the UK or Financial Space.
Since 2018, there was a 46% bounce within the variety of nurses from Nigeria, a 21% rise in these from Ghana and a 16% rise from Zimbabwe.
Mark Dayan, a coverage analyst on the thinktank and Brexit programme lead, stated: “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.”
The ending of the free motion of labour into the UK by EU nationals from the beginning of 2021 had created a harmful “over-reliance” by the NHS on clinicians from red-list nations in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, the thinktank’s report on well being within the UK after Brexit says.
“Particularly since the end of free movement of labour at the start of 2021, a remarkably steep and sustained increase in staff trained or holding nationalities outside the UK and EU has occurred,” says the report, revealed on Friday.
NHS England figures, which the thinktank obtained underneath freedom of knowledge legal guidelines, present the variety of red-list nurses working in England rose 36% to 21,500 between March 2023 and November 2024. The variety of docs elevated over the identical interval by 24% to 13,675, whereas the variety of workers who assist docs and nurses soared by 74% to 21,600.
The findings elevate questions on whether or not the NHS is adhering to the WHO’s edict to not “actively recruit” well being professionals from the 55 nations, which has been endorsed by the Division of Well being and Social Care on behalf of the UK authorities. The WHO advises towards recruitment from these nations as a result of they “face the most pressing health workforce challenges related to universal health coverage” and have too few personnel to care correctly for their very own populations.
The figures prompted Wes Streeting to accuse the NHS of performing in an “immoral” means by depriving needy nations of homegrown well being professionals.
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“The NHS has been left in the immoral position of pinching doctors and nurses from countries which desperately need them, because the Conservatives couldn’t be bothered to train enough medics,” the well being secretary stated.
“At the same time, straight-A students in this country have been locked out of medical school, and we are failing to bring enough young people into the nursing and caring professions.”
He stated he was “determined to reduce the NHS’s reliance on recruitment from red-list countries by investing in training the next generation of NHS staff through our plan for change”. Officers are drawing up a revised model of the NHS long-term workforce plan revealed by the earlier Conservative authorities in 2023, which included a significant growth of UK-trained workers.
Ageing populations worldwide have created a world race to rent docs, nurses, healthcare assistants and different specialist workers, with wealthy nations more and more turning to workers educated in Asia and Africa. Ten high-income nations – together with the UK, US, Australia and Saudi Arabia – account for 70% of the worldwide migration of well being professionals.
Sebastian Rees, the pinnacle of well being on the IPPR thinktank, stated: “While the NHS benefits hugely from the experience and skills of staff trained overseas, its over-reliance on recruitment from red-list countries is both unethical and unsustainable.
“Recruiting from these countries risks damaging fragile healthcare systems and undermines longstanding efforts to extend medical care to those who need it most – the world’s poorest.”
Nonetheless Jim Campbell, the WHO’s director of workforce, stated most of the red-list workers had utilized straight for jobs within the UK and due to this fact “unethical” recruitment by the NHS was a lot much less widespread than the Nuffield Belief’s total numbers steered.
“This is startling data and raises ethical questions. But behind the headline data there’s a lot of discussions going on between [the UK and other] governments about graduates seeking career opportunities by joining the NHS and doing jobs that they wouldn’t be able to do in their own countries. There’s a lot of people in that category,” he stated.
