London: Many of the 900 nurses to be recruited in the next four years in order to address the shortage of trained workforce at a UK health board will be from India, according to a report.
Gareth Howells, director of nursing and patient experience at Swansea Bay health board, said overseas recruitment provided an “immediacy of really experienced staff”, reported BBC recently.
Agency nurses and the health board’s nursing bank help address the shortage in the workforce. The shortfall is as high as 40 per cent in acute care and surgery, it added. A total of 350 nurses are to be recruited from overseas in the current financial year, subject to approval by chief executive Mark Hackett, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.
Meanwhile, there are concerns in the UK whether there is enough effort to train nurses within the country. However, according to the BBC report, looking for overseas recruitment is a cheaper option.
It would cost about £4.7m to employ 350 overseas nurses in 2023-24, but this would save £1.5m in agency and nursing bank costs.
Incidentally, the board has already started recruiting nurses from Kerala. More such visits to hire trained staff are expected in the future. In one such event, 107 new nurses were recruited from Kochi this year. They will join duties this month. It was the first ever such recruitment held in India.
