The new Home Office rule to put salary criteria for overseas nurses to remain in the country will hit thousand nurses working in the NHS….reports Asian Lite News
Overseas nurses working in junior posts could be forced to return home under new immigration rules, nursing union leaders have warned.
The new pay threshold for migrants means non-European workers will have to leave the UK after six years if they are not earning at least £35,000.
The Royal College of Nursing said the rules would “cause chaos” for the NHS and waste money spent on recruitment.
Andrew Gwynne MP, Labour’s Shadow Health Minister said: “People coming from other countries to work in the NHS make a huge contribution and our health service would not cope without them.
“But this is a mess entirely of David Cameron’s own making. His short-sighted cuts to nurse training left NHS hospitals with no option but to recruit from overseas or hire expensive agency nurses.
“As ever with this government, it is patients who will pay the price for David Cameron’s mismanagement of the NHS.”
The Home Office said the rules would help reduce demand for migrant labour.
The move is part of the government’s effort to control net migration, but the union says that by 2017 more than 3,300 NHS nurses could be affected. And by the end of the decade the numbers could be double that – a potential waste of nearly £40m when all the costs of recruitment are taken into account, the RCN says.
There are more than 400,000 nurses working in the NHS in England.
T
RCN general secretary Peter Carter told BBC : “The immigration rules will cause chaos for the NHS and other care services. At a time when demand is increasing, the UK is perversely making it harder to employ staff from overseas.”
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the move was “totally illogical” as there is currently a “major shortage of nurses”, leading to many NHS trusts spending “tens of millions” to recruit from overseas.
Dr Carter also stressed that most nurses earn “nowhere near” £35,000, with most on salaries of between £21,000 and £28,000 a year.
Due to cuts to nurse-training places, trusts are being forced into relying on overseas recruitment as well as temporary staff just to provide safe staffing.
The long-term solution is to train more nurses in the UK, but in the interim, foreign nurses filled the gap, he added.
He said of the new rules: “It can’t be morally or ethically right but will also have a huge impact on the ability of the health service to carry on in the way it has.”
A Home Office spokesman said: “As the prime minister has made clear, the government wants to reduce the demand for migrant labour.
“We changed the settlement rules in 2011 to break the link between coming to work in the UK and staying here permanently.”
He said employers had had four years to prepare for the changes, adding: “There are exemptions to this threshold where the UK has a shortage.”
At the moment nurses are not on that exemption list, but the spokesman said it was possible they could still be added if evidence showed this was needed.