Background: Foreign-trained nurse recruits exceeded the number of new British-trained recruits on the UK nurse register for the first time in 2001. As the nursing shortage continues, health care service providers rely increasingly on overseas nurses to fill the void. Which areas benefit the most? And where would the NHS be without them?
Methods:
Using cross-sectional data from the 2004 Nursing and Midwifery Council register, nurse resident postcodes are mapped to Strategic Health Authorities to see where foreign recruits locate and how they affect nurse shortages throughout the UK.
Amber S Batata*
Address: Judge Institute of Management, Cambridge University, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1AG, UK
Email: Amber S Batata* - amberbatata@yahoo.com
* Corresponding author
Abstract
Background:
on the UK nurse register for the first time in 2001. As the nursing shortage continues, health care
service providers rely increasingly on overseas nurses to fill the void. Which areas benefit the most?
And where would the NHS be without them?Foreign-trained nurse recruits exceeded the number of new British-trained recruits
Methods:
resident postcodes are mapped to Strategic Health Authorities to see where foreign recruits locate
and how they affect nurse shortages throughout the UK.Using cross-sectional data from the 2004 Nursing and Midwifery Council register, nurse
Results:
recruits, with 24% of foreign-trained nurses in the UK residing in the London area and another 16%
in the SouthEast (comparable numbers for British-trained nurses are 11% and 13%, respectively).
Without foreign recruitment, vacancy rates could be up to five times higher (three times higher if
only Filipino recruits remained).Areas with the highest vacancy rates also have the highest representation of foreign
Conclusion:
staffing crisis would be far worse, particularly in high vacancy areas.The UK heavily relies on foreign recruitment to fill vacancies, without which the
Background
The National Health Service (NHS) has been suffering the
effects of a nursing shortage for the past decade as fewer
women train or remain in the nurse workforce, favoring
improved job market opportunities in other sectors. The
same is true of many other industrialised nations. Over
the next 5–10 years, the nurse shortfall is predicted to be
275,000 in the US; 53,000 in the UK and 40,000 in Australia
by 2010 [1]. By 2020, the US shortfall may be as
high as 800,000 [2]. Efforts to address the shortage
include return-to-work initiatives, improved pay, better
working environment and flexible hours, and attracting
more students to nurse training programs. Even so, the
negative aspects of a nursing career discourage many people
from training or remaining in the nurse workforce.
Perceptions of the NHS as a poor employer are particularly
acute and wages remain below other professions,
even other jobs within the public sector [3,4].
In this age of globalisation, many countries have turned to
overseas recruitment to fill the vacancies caused by a limited
or unwilling locally trained workforce. Foreigntrained
nurses accounted for 23% of the nurse workforce
in New Zealand in 2002; 6% in Canada (2001); 8% in Ireland
(2002) and the UK (2001); and 4% in the US in 2000
[1]. And these numbers are likely to grow if domestic
Published: 22 April 2005
Globalization and Health
Received: 03 December 2004
Accepted: 22 April 2005
This article is available from: http://www.globalizationandhealth.com/content/1/1/7
© 2005 Batata; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.2005, 1:7 doi:10.1186/1744-8603-1-7