UK healthcare battles recruitment crisis

Britain’s National Health Service, which provides free healthcare funded from general taxation and welfare contributions, is one of the world’s largest and most cosmopolitan employers.

But the NHS -- which listed 211 nationalities in England alone in 2020 -- faces chronic staff shortages.

By 2029, the state-run service in England will face a shortfall of 108,000 nurses, according to the Health Foundation think-tank.

Now there are fears the crisis will further deepen due to a combination of shocks depleting its substantial foreign workforce: retirement, the coronavirus pandemic, Brexit and tougher immigration rules.

Migration has long been a “stopgap solution” as Britain suffered “recurring crises” for 40 years, said Mark Dayan, policy analyst at the Nuffield Trust health think-tank.

No chance

Retired doctor Iftikhar Ali Syed left Pakistan for Britain in 1960 and spent 45 years working in Burnley, a northern English town defined by factory chimneys belching black smoke.

Syed, 86, belonged to a generation of medical professionals from ex-British colonies who filled labour shortages after World War II.

They were directed to poorer regions -- often ex-industrial heartlands like northern England and south Wales -- where recruitment was hardest and health needs greatest.

Even today, the life expectancy gap between deprived areas of northern England and the more affluent southeast is more than 10 years.

“Overseas doctors had no chance. You got a practice where no-one wants it,” Syed told AFP.

Syed and other immigrant doctors of his generation “flooded” Burnley, he remembered, helping to establish its first cardiology unit and improve midwifery services.

But they retired after 2000, creating a shortage in Burnley, mirrored in places where immigrants disproportionately filled healthcare roles.

Tremendous demand

As in other countries, the pandemic has traumatised and exhausted Britain’s frontline health and social care staff and created a huge backlog in treatments for other conditions.

In the year to March 2021, international travel disruptions meant 3,700 fewer nurses came to Britain than in the previous year.

Faizan Rana, a 34-year-old NHS operations manager, said pandemic travel curbs have weakened services and exacerbated staff shortages at his London hospital and elsewhere.