Foreign nurses leaving UK to seek better pay abroad

The United Kingdom's National Health Service, or NHS, is losing around 9,000 foreign nurses a year to better-paid positions in other countries, according to new research from the Health Foundation, a charity focused on improving the nation's health care.

The charity said the NHS was massively understaffed to begin with and cannot afford to lose its foreign nurses, many of whom now seem to view jobs in the UK as stepping stone on the road to an acceptable salary elsewhere.

Anne Marie Rafferty, a professor of nursing studies at King's College London, told The Guardian newspaper: "It feels like the NHS is falling down the league table as a destination of choice for overseas nurses. Worryingly, it feels as if the UK is perceived not as a high — but middle-income country in pay terms and as a staging post where nurses from overseas can acclimatize to Western-type health systems in the search for better pay and conditions."

The Health Foundation's research found the number of UK-registered nurses — both UK-born and those from overseas — who left the country to work elsewhere doubled between 2021 and 2022, to 12,400.And the charity said the total number of nurses leaving each year has quadrupled since before the start of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

It said seven out of every 10 nurses who left the NHS during 2023, some 8,680 highly-qualified workers, were from outside the EU, with the vast majority hailing from either India or the Philippines.

The charity said many of those nurses had worked in the UK's NHS for around three years before deciding it was time to move on, often to either the United States, New Zealand, or Australia.

The Health Foundation said the reason for the exodus is easy to fathom; nurses can earn almost twice as much by moving on.

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, nurses in the UK earn an average of $46,000 a year while those plying their trade in Australia make an average of $71,000, and those in the US earn $84,900.

The NHS currently has around 40,000 nursing vacancies and relies on foreign nurses to cope with its workload.

Pat Cullen, the Royal College of Nursing's chief executive and general secretary, told The Guardian the exodus of overseas-trained nurses had been triggered by pay erosion in the UK that has taken place since 2010.

"It is deeply worrying to see more and more overseas nurses choosing to leave the UK," she said. "The recruitment of domestic nurses is collapsing and services are gripped by workforce shortages. With patient needs already going unmet, the prospect of losing more of our international colleagues doesn't bear thinking about."