Changes to British immigration rules will force thousands of nurses recruited by the National Health Service from non-European Union countries to leave the United Kingdom in the next two years. Under the new immigration rules persons from outside the European Union should be earning £35,000 or more in order to be able to stay in the UK after six years. In a study released today at its annual conference in Bournemouth the Royal College of Nursing said that 3365 nurses, whose training has cost the NHS £20.19 million, could be affected immediately by the rule. If international recruitment stays at the same level as it is now, by 2020 the numbers affected will be 6620. “If workforce pressures force a higher rate of international recruitment, the number of nurses affected could be 29,755, costing over £178.5million to recruit,” RCN says.
Most nurses would not reach the income threshold of £35,000 – which is a senior nurse’s salary – in six years time, the RCN says. Among those affected will doubtless be Indian nurses, who are the second highest non-EU nationality after Filipinos in the nursing workforce in this country. “India has always been a significant sending country for nurses, and the numbers are increasing,” Howard Catton, Head of Policy and International Affairs at the Royal College of Nurses, told The Hindu . “Last year Indians made up 40 per cent of foreign nurses recruited from non-EU countries.” The total number of registered nurses and midwives in the UK is 685537. Of them 16817 received training in India and came to the UK to work. The number of Indians likely to be affected by the immigration rule has not been calculated so far. According to Dr Peter Carter, Chief Executive & General Secretary of the RCN, the immigration rules “will cause chaos for the NHS and other care services.”
“At a time when demand is increasing, the UK is perversely making it harder to employ staff from overseas. The NHS has spent millions hiring nurses from overseas in order to provide safe staffing levels. These rules will mean that money has just been thrown down the drain.” “The crisis is embedded in the system,” Phoebe Griffith, Associate Director for Migration, Integration and Communities at the Institute of Public Policy Research told The Hindu . “One in four nurses in the NHS are recruited from abroad. Yet the government has cut funding for training centres, which has seen seats reduced from 20,000 in 2010 to 17,000 in 2013; and on the other hand they are putting restraints on overseas nurses.”
