UK NHS nurses drifting west to USA

Main Category: Nursing / Midwifery
Article Date: 15 Nov 2003 - 0:00 PDT


THE UK health service is about to become a victim of its own policy of poaching qualified nurses from developing nations. Now the United States is starting to poach NHS (National Health Service - UK) staff.

New, unpublished figures from the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) show that the numbers of nurses leaving the UK to work in America more than doubled last year, reports Nursing Times (November 4). Verification checks of UK nurses requested by American employers increased from 1,089 in 2001 to 2,224 in 2002.

The United States has a growing need for extra nurses to start filling the huge demographic holes that are predicted for the next decade.

The exodus of nurses from the UK is a growing problem for the NHS. Last year, NMC figures show that 8,079 nurses left to work abroad, the most in ten years. Nursing Times says that US recruitment agencies are increasing their presence at job fairs in Britain, and putting enticing adverts in the professional press.

One company, Working America, is offering guaranteed jobs to registered nurses who want to move to the States with their families. The package includes salaries of up to $65,000 (£39,000), two months' rent-free housing, paid airfare, visas for all the family, continuing education opportunities, a green card working visa and the possibility of citizenship.

Britain faces its own recruitment crisis, with warnings last month that hundreds of thousands of nurses will be lost to the NHS because they are in their fifties and due to retire.

James Buchan, a nursing workforce analyst, tells the journal: "Employers in America rate nurses from the UK as having a high standard of training and they are rated as good workers." He adds: "It will not get any easier to retain NHS nurses because there will be increasing competition between here and the USA."

Howard Catton, the senior employment relations adviser at the Royal College of Nursing, cautions the health service against being complacent. "We are going to be in their sights. If they are offering a destination such as California - compared with inner-city England - with commitments to help with visas, work permits and moving families, it will be a hugely attractive pull," he says.

"If I were an American employer I would be targeting UK-trained nurses. They are regarded as top of the table of nurse training. The USA will do what the USA needs to do to recruit as many as it needs."

A spokesman for the Department of Health says: "We would expect a certain number of British nurses to go to the USA, but we want to make sure they come home."

Wanless plots public health

THE first clues about "the most important health document in the decade", an inquiry into public health, have been dropped at a conference by its author, Derek Wanless.

The main themes of his report, expected next March, will be: encouraging deprived or marginalised communities to improve their own health; gathering evidence for the cost-effectiveness of different interventions; and funding and organising integrated health and social care work.

The Health Service Journal (November 6) says Wanless revealed the themes to a Health Development Agency conference, where he said that delegates should consider how trusts should set their priorities for targeting particular groups, and what types of evidence would be most valuable.

The journal says that obesity will form the main policy battleground between those who want regulation and those who believe education can tackle it. "Mr Blair's advisers must like what they see in Australia, where a government taking a hard look at banning junk-food adverts led to marketers and food makers falling over themselves to self-regulate," it says.

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