The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) reports that the number of registered nurses and nurse practitioners in the United Kingdom who were educated outside the nation is rising. About half of the new nurses who signed up in the last six months had received their education abroad.
More than 13,000 additional nursing professionals will be added to the registry between April and September of 2022, bringing the total number of registered nurses to a record high of 771,445. The NMC reports that nurses educated in countries other than the UK are primarily responsible for increasing the number of registered nurses, midwives, and nursing associates during the past six months.
During the period under review, 11,496 nursing staff members with international training entered the registry for the first time. There were 5% more nurses from outside the United States joining in the same period in 2021, and there was a slight drop in the number of nurses who had received their training in the United Kingdom, from 12,102 to 12,012.
The data show that the NHS increasingly relies on nurses educated abroad to fill nursing shortages.
Fewer than 24,000 newly registered nurses in the United Kingdom have earned their education outside the country in the twelve months before September 2022. More than 30% more persons joined the register than the previous year and about 5x as many as the 5,083 who joined in the 12 months before September 2018.
Meanwhile, in the 12 months before September 2022, over 24,100 nurses with training in the UK entered the register for the first time. This is a rise of 4% from the same time in 2021 and an increase of 9% from the same time in 2018.
The bulk of the 7,241 new international nurses had training in India or the Philippines. To this day, Ghana and Nigeria are still two of the top ten countries providing nurses despite being on the WHO's red list of countries from which recruitment should be avoided.
The chief executive and general secretary of the Royal Nursing College, Pat Cullen, noted that these findings raised severe ethical concerns.
She said, "The government is stealing the rest of the planet to cover up for big losses at home, and they provide statistics ministers with difficult ethical questions to address." According to the statistics, ministers "have no choice but to address these concerns."
"To swiftly improve recruitment and retention, we have consistently requested that the British government invest in nursing, particularly in fair pay.
Then she claimed, "they're recruiting nurses from nations that can barely afford to offer them themselves," citing countries like Nigeria and Ghana as examples. To keep their jobs, they hire nurses from nations that can hardly afford to pay them." Colleagues who have studied or worked in different countries bring a wealth of experience and knowledge.
According to NHS Employers chief executive Danny Mortimer, the growing reliance on foreign workers in recent years reflects a deficiency in training and education in the UK.
Health leaders like Mr. Mortimer have been pressing the government for details on the workforce plan detailed in the chancellor's autumn statement "against a setting of 132,000 job vacancies" because more than 40,000 nurses have already left the NHS. This would build on earlier government initiatives to attract nurses from overseas, ensuring a well-trained and diverse NHS staff," he said. The National Health Service is amidst a major personnel crisis due to the vacancy of 132,000 posts and the departure of around 40,000 nurses.
Unison's head of health Sara Gorton agreed that salary and staffing were at the heart of the NHS's problems.
The NHS will maintain its tradition of respecting its international staff. She noted that a retention plan for UK health professionals was urgently needed and that relying on recruitment from other nations was not an appropriate solution.
Ms. Gorton has urged the government to fix NHS pay to prevent staff turnover and improve patient care.
The NMC data also revealed unprecedented levels of ethnic diversity across the nursing workforce in the UK. Asian, Black, and other minority ethnicities comprise more than a quarter of the nursing workforce.
Approximately 26% of all registered nurses, midwives, and nursing associates in the United Kingdom are members of minority ethnic groups, including Blacks and Asians. Compared to the total for 2018, this is an increase of 7%.
This reflected a more ethnically diverse workforce trained in the United Kingdom and an increase in nurses recruited from other countries. About a quarter of newly registered British nurses with minority racial or ethnic backgrounds were of African-American, Asian, or another non-white ancestry between April and September this year.
Andrea Sutcliffe, CEO and registrar of the NMC, emphasized the "vital" need to support the increasingly diverse nursing and midwifery profession adequately.
In a survey published earlier this year, the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) found that referrals to the regulator were disproportionately higher for nurses who reported feeling like "outsiders" due to protected characteristics like race or gender.
