NHS Recruitment Crunch

By November 3, 2017News
nhs recruitment EVP and employer branding

European nurses and midwives leaving UK in droves since Brexit vote – 8 practical steps to help mitigate the impact…

The national news carried the above headline, but when you examine the figures, you realise just how shocking the actual numbers behind the headline were. The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) reported that:

  • The number of nurses and midwives coming to work in Britain from Europe has plunged by 89% since the UK voted to leave the EU.
  • The sharp fall coincided with a sudden increase in qualified European medics leaving the NMC’s register: from 2,435 in 2015-16 to 4,067 in the last year – a rise of 67%.
  • The data also shows a third worrying trend – the number of UK-trained nurses and midwives leaving the register rose by 11%, from 26,653 in 2015-16 to 29,019 last year.
  • And all this on top of an estimated shortfall of 40,000 nurses across the UK and 3,500 midwives in England alone.

Having worked within the NHS recruitment sector for a number of years and fully aware of the issues that it currently faces, these stats are very sobering indeed. There’s no magic wand, but we thought it would be an idea to list out what we felt might be some of the practical steps which NHS Trusts and other healthcare bodies could do now with their employer branding and recruitment advertising which could potentially help mitigate some of the impact.

For the full article and the NMC report, please see: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/european-nurses-midwives-leaving-uk-droves-since-brexit-mike-heal/