NHS to fast-track nurses as record EU staff leave service after Brexit vote

NHS England is to launch a new nursing training programme to help plug the gap created by the record number of Europeans leaving the service in the wake of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union.

Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, acknowledged that the service relies on international staff, including more than 12,000 nurses who are EU nationals out of the 315,000 nurses on its payroll.

Speaking on the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme before the launch of a five-year plan for the NHS, he announced a training programme to “grow the workforce from within this country”.

The moves comes after new figures revealed that a record 17,197 EU nationals, including doctors and nurses, left the NHS last year.

Asked if he was worried about the impact of Brexit, Stevens said: “The NHS has always relied on international staff as well as staff from this country. It is about 4% of our nurses who come from the rest of the European Union. We are grateful for the work that they do.”

But he suggested newly trained British nurses could help fill the gap left by EU nationals once Britain leaves the bloc.

Stevens said: “We have got a curious situation where many more people in this country would like to train to be nurses than we have nurse training places. So we want to expand the number of nurse training places and the routes into nursing so that we can grow the work force from within this country as well.”

He said the new training programme would be modelled on an initiative to recruit more teachers.

“We are announcing a new programme called Nurse First, which is the equivalent of the Teach First programme, whereby new graduates can fast-track into nursing alongside other apprenticeship routes … so that we can expand the number of nurses we have.”

The programme will boost the number of newly qualified nurses by up to 2,200 more a year in 2019 when the UK is due to leave the EU.

In a wide-ranging interview, Stevens denied he was abandoning the 18-week waiting time target for non-urgent operations by relaxing the deadline for hospitals to meet the deadline.

He said: “Fifteen years ago you might be waiting 18 months for your hip or your knee operation, now for nine out of 10 people it’s 18 weeks. The average wait for an operation is 10 weeks. Over the next couple of years we want to have more funded operations on the NHS, but we recognise that the rate of growth is probably going to have to be a little bit slower than it has at points in the past, because we also want to make big improvements in cancer care, in GP services and in mental health services as well.”

The Royal College of Surgeons said the new guidelines amounted to “waving the white flag on the 18-week target”.

Asked if the target had been jettisoned, Stevens said: “It hasn’t. The reality is that there are pressures right across the health service. Under those circumstances we have to make a start on sorting out particularly those pressures in A&E departments which we have seen over the course of the last winter. But over the course of the next several years we want to continue to expand the amount of surgery that is being done, so that waiting times stay low.”

He also announced that all major A&E hospital departments will have to provide GP services to help emergency medics focus on the sickest patients. Steven said: “You can find about 60 hospitals right now that have got this arrangement. This is going to be rolled out to all major A&Es.”

Stevens confirmed that the NHS wanted to stamp out an estimated £4m spent on homeopathic medicine. He dismissed homeopathy as a “placebo at best” and said it was a “classic example of what we want to see less of”.

NHS to fast-track nurses as record EU staff leave service after Brexit vote