Recruiting Nurses Overseas Must Work For All | Letter

Your study connected nan 93% autumn successful overseas nurses (Drop successful overseas workers is ‘car crash’ for UK hospitals and attraction homes, opportunity experts, 26 February) lays bare really limited nan UK has go connected world recruitment. When visa argumentation shifts tin trigger warnings of an “impending car crash”, it shows a workforce exemplary built connected fragility, not resilience.

For years, nan UK – for illustration different high-income countries – has relied connected internationally knowledgeable nurses to capable home shortages. That whitethorn person eased contiguous pressures, but it masked chronic underinvestment successful training, pay and retention astatine home. Tightening migration without first building self-sufficiency simply exposes that failure.

But location is besides a world dimension. Many of nan countries nan UK recruits from person acold less nurses per capita and tin sick spend to suffer knowledgeable staff. As nurses tell america repeatedly, sustainable workforce argumentation must activity for some sides.

The UK now has an opportunity to lead and perpetrate to genuine home self-sufficiency while moving pinch different awesome recruiting nations to found a co-investment system – perchance a world money for caregiver acquisition – truthful that countries benefiting from world recruitment besides reinvest successful those they enlistee from.

Migration should not beryllium a pat turned connected and off. It must beryllium ethical, planned and mutually beneficial.
Howard Catton
CEO, International Council of Nurses