How will Brexit impact the NHS? It already has. Nurses from the EU are much less keen to come and work here. Today the Times reported that in the last four months of 2015, an average of 797 EU nurses per month signed up to work in the UK; over the same period last year, that number fell to 194 a month. We currently have a huge shortage of nurses, with 24,000 jobs unfilled in England alone.
You can see this shortfall any time you go into a hospital. There is pressure on beds, on doctors and on nurses. Often there just aren’t enough of them, and they are overstretched. Some A&E departments that used to have 20 nurses are now down to half that number, and staff feel at breaking point. The five Cs that nurses are taught in their training – commitment, conscience, competence, compassion and confidence – are impossible to practise properly in the circumstances many are working in.
There have long been warnings of these shortages but a complete lack of long-term planning, now combined with Brexit, is bringing the situation to a head. We have an ageing population with complex needs. One in three nurses is set to retire in the next decade. The introduction of loans instead of bursaries for training means a 23% drop in applications for nursing and midwifery. Anyone could have predicted that taking away bursaries would prompt this result. No one goes into nursing for the money, so why did George Osborne decide to make it even harder? Why, when we need more nurses, are we not reinvesting in training?
This shortage had been plugged by about 7% of our nurses coming from the EU. If we fail to train nurses that’s how it has to be. This is where so much Brexit rhetoric falls apart. While Theresa May talks tough, refusing to guarantee EU nationals a right to stay, these nurses feel neither wanted nor welcome and will understandably go elsewhere. As Janet Davies, chief executive and general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, has said: “The government is turning off the supply of qualified nurses from around the world at the very moment the health service is in a staffing crisis like never before.”
When in hospital we are at our most dependent. There may be those who complain about immigration but most people have experience of being cared for by someone who has come here to work. Our NHS could not function otherwise. Is May going to further exacerbate the nursing shortage by making the UK so hostile and unwelcoming to EU nurses they will go elsewhere? Well, this is already happening; people won’t take jobs here in such uncertain times. Yet we continue not to train enough nurses and have made it more financially difficult for them. Where is the joined-up thinking on this? The toxic discourse about “foreigners” stealing jobs may not have been intended for the nurse who washes you after your operation, but that’s how it pans out. We can choose to make people feel welcome or not, but it turns out we need them more than they need us.
EU nurses no longer want to work in Britain. Brexit is poisoning the NHS | Suzanne Moore
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