Where Have All The EU Nurses Gone?

I work as a nurse in London and I’ve always worked in very ethnically mixed staff teams, it’s one of the joys of working here. I currently work with a Portuguese nurse who is extremely good, when she was promoted to a Band 6 role I was very happy.

I have worked with many, many EU nurses. They have been some of the best nurses I've worked with. The NHS in London would not be able to function without all the EU nurses who work here. But London isn’t the only place in this country were the NHS is reliant on EU nurses. The NHS employs 33,000 EU nurses (1), a little over 10% of all the nurses it employs (2), and these nurses have enabled many NHS services to keep going.

But it now looks as if we are to lose those EU nurses we so desperately need.

A Freedom of Information request has shown that there has been a 92% fall in EU nurses coming to work here since the Brexit referendum in July (3). Only 96 nurses applied to work in Britain in December 2016 (3), compared to 1,304 in July 2016. 2016 also saw 2,700 EU nurses leave the NHS, when only 1,600 left in 2014 (3). That is a 68% increase.

This only adds to the shortage of nurses plaguing the NHS, and leaves it facing a problem that will only impact on patient care.

Since 2010, there has been a 15% fall in the number of student nurse places being funded (4). Add to this that there is a dropout rate of 26% on nurse training courses (5) and we are not training enough nurses. We are also facing an ageing nursing population, 45% of registered nurses are now over 45 (4).

Since 2003 there has been a 50% increase in empty NHS nursing posts (6), EU nurses have been very important in filling many of the gaps in the NHS nursing workforce. Without them we would be a far worse place than we are now, but soon we may be finding out what that place will be like. We are losing our EU nurses and we should be very worried.

There is only one reason for this sudden and huge lose of EU nurses and that is Brexit. No matter how you voted in the referendum, Brexit has made Britain a very unattractive place for EU workers. This could have been eased by Theresa May offering a guarantee to all EU workers in Britain that they are safe to continue working here as long as they want to, but she has refused to do this (7). Therefore Britain is no longer seen as a safe place to work for EU nationals, and the NHS is suffering already.

What is Jeremy Hunt, Minister of Health, doing in the face of this sudden and dramatic loss of EU nurses? Is he lobbying Theresa May for special protections for EU nurses? Is he working hard to portray the NHS as still a safe and welcoming place for EU nurses to come and work in? No. He is denying that there is even a problem. He has said, in answer to MPs questions about this 92% fall, that it was not caused by Brexit but, “the reasons why there has been a drop in the number of nurses coming from the EU is because, prior to the Brexit vote, we introduced much stricter language tests.” (8) The level of his denial is breath-taking and this is the man in charge of the NHS, but he has previously bluntly ignored problems facing the NHS, why should we expect different now?

The NHS needs its EU nurses, there is no debate about that because the figures back this up, but Brexit has cast a shadow over them. If we lose them the NHS will hit a crisis that could easily eclipse the Mid Staffordshire scandal (9). But our leaders are openly ignoring this. Theresa May’s and Jeremy Hunt’s words and actions show that they are not concerned about this and are not going to take any actions to stop this.

What do we do when our political leaders ignore another crisis facing the NHS?… Pray for a revolution?

Drew Payne