Britain's health service to launch global recruitment drive due to staffing crisis

Britain’s health service is set to launch a global recruitment drive for nurses amid a major staffing crisis.

It follows a campaign last year to encourage medical professionals in the UAE to come and work in the UK.

Uncertainty over Brexit has led to a massive drop in applications from European candidates and an exodus of overstretched staff.

The international campaign is expected to be widened to India and the Philippines.

The service, which employs 1.3m people, presently has more than 100,000 vacancies.

An interim draft of the NHS' proposed improvement strategy reveals it aims to recruit more than 30,000 foreign nurses over the next five years, according to the Times.

It will be almost five times more a year than the present figure.

It reveals the report claims “shortages in nursing are the single biggest and most urgent” problem, adding “we will need to increase international recruitment to secure additional supply rapidly”.

Dame Donna Kinnair, chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing, told the paper: “It is sad that nursing in England has been allowed to get to this state through a lack of accountability. We were a part of writing this plan and it is right to acknowledge the difficulties and focus on finding solutions.”

In November, research carried out by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) on behalf of the Cavendish Coalition, which is made up of 36 health and social care organisations, predicted a black hole of more than 50,000 nurses by 2021.

It comes as research showed that in the year following the Brexit referendum there was a 32% drop in nurses from the EU joining and a 55% increase in nurses leaving the UK.

The London Ambulance Service has been targeting the UAE to encourage British paramedics to return to the UK.

Many of the paramedics in the UAE’s National Ambulance Service, which covers Sharjah, Fujairah and Ras Al Khaimah, are expats.