Changes to Immigration Laws Threaten NHS Stability

I hope you are sitting down as you read this post, because what I am about to tell you is so shocking it almost sounds unreal.

A few weeks ago we featured a blog post concerning the shortage of health care professionals and the pressure on the NHS. The article worked through all of the relevant issues to show that as the situation stands at the moment, the NHS is not sustainable without the import of doctors and nurses from overseas.

Now the government has introduced legislation that will require all foreign-sourced employees from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) to be able to show minimum earnings of £35,000 p.a. after six years of residence, or they will be sent back to their country of origin.

Measuring the cost of Austerity

Cutbacks to the NHS and to higher education are now bearing fruit, but not in a good way. Reports in the Guardian and other UK media indicate that up to half of the NHS nursing workforce is sourced from overseas.

What is that costing? The report in the Guardian puts the minimum figure at £5.5bn, but it is suggested that the figure could be as high as £10bn. That is a serious amount of money.

It is important to acknowledge that this extraordinarily large expense is not the fault of the foreign-sourced workers. They have been recruited by UK hospital trusts to fill urgent vacancies that exist due to the Coalition cutting of at least 10,000 nurse training places since the previous election.

Much is made of the fact that we have an aging population, but it must be remembered that a portion of that aging population includes doctors and nurses. When we have more of our doctors and nurses retiring than we have graduating, it creates a big problem.

We can only fill the void by recruiting from overseas, and the expense involved in doing that is enormous. The data shows that not only is this situation wasteful, but it is actually not closing the gap enough.

What I mean by that is if the government cut 10,000 nurses training places and in 2014 we only imported 5,778 nurses, we must be short of the required number of nurses by 4,222. That does not even take into account the number of recent UK graduates that decide to go and work abroad themselves, so the shortfall could be even higher.

Consider that the NHS will not (and can not) match the salaries paid to nurses by states such as Saudi Arabia and the US, and you will see that it is inevitable that we must lose some of our qualified doctors and nurses.

To meet this challenge, with a growing and aging population, we should be increasing training opportunities, not decreasing them, to ensure that we have more than enough nursing graduates to meet our needs. If they have to temporarily work as bus drivers and shop assistants because there are too many nurses, then so be it. That is a much better situation than not having enough UK trained nurses.

Over 3,000 vitally required nurses could be affected

According to data sourced from prospects.ac.uk, the average salary of Band 5 NHS nurses is between £21,692 and £28,180. Only nurses that are at Band 7 or above are expected to earn more than the minimum level that the government has currently indicated.

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) estimates that up to 3,365 nurses would be at risk of deportation under the new rules, and that the many millions of pounds spent on recruiting them will be wasted as a result. Obviously, more millions of pounds will also need to be spent on recruiting new replacements.

This is unfair to people who have staked quite a bit in moving to the UK to work in jobs that supposedly needed to be filled urgently, but that is only the first part of the problem. A second, and more important part of the problem, is that the urgent vacancy will still exist when that worker is deported.

“So what?” a critic may ask. “We could always simply find another foreign worker to fill that vacancy!” Indeed that is possible, but think of what we are losing in the process. The person being deported has at least six years of experience working within the British NHS, and they are being replaced by somebody who, however qualified they may be, has no experience of our system.

The NHS could be pushed to the brink of collapse

It has been obvious for some time that the NHS has been under enormous strain, and it is stretched almost to breaking point. By cutting training places, the government has created a reliance on foreign-sourced personnel, and has increased NHS spending on recruitment to unsustainable levels.

Is it going too far to suggest that perhaps the whole point of these measures, which the RCN described as “truly incompetent”, may be actually intended to wipe out the NHS once and for all? Or should we accept that it is genuine incompetence? Either way there is no way for the government to save face – either they are going to be seen as sinister conspirators or bumbling fools.

In the end, it won’t make a blind bit of difference for the rest of us what they are, because the result will be the same – the NHS will collapse unless it is supported.

At this stage a lot of damage has already been done, and to properly support the NHS and get things back on track, the government will need to radically reverse existing detrimental policies. This would include providing more training places in all health-related fields, providing incentive for UK professionals to remain in the UK, and making a serious effort to retain foreign-sourced professionals that have required massive resources to recruit.

In fact, rather than threatening them with deportation, we should be luring them with promises of permanent residence or even citizenship, so that we can keep that valuable expertise and experience here in the UK where we need it.

Tell us what you think

As a result of the EC Rights ruling, Hylton-Potts have had great success at enabling many hundreds of doctors and other medical staff from outside of the EEA to come to the UK and gain employment. If you’re currently facing the prospect of deportation due to the new policy that we’ve just spoken about above, get in touch with us here at Hylton-Potts to talk more about how we may be able to help you to continue to live and work in the UK.

We are always interested to know what our readers think about these issues so you are most welcome to leave a comment and share your thoughts about the matters raised in this week’s post.

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