This article centers on the United Kingdom’s recruitment of medical personnel from around the world…putting the health of residents of third world countries at risk by raiding their healthcare professionals. But this isn’t unique to the UK. Many other western nations including the United States are actively recruiting abroad as well. This is just the most easily documented example.
And as the uneducated anti-education mob continues to attack the American educational systems, our access to Americans who are health care professionals will become increasingly dire. And as we all know the US is already short staffed across the nation and increasingly so in rural areas and neighborhoods where people of color are concentrated.
But on to this brief peek under the curtain into modern Western colonialism:
Britain recruited a record number of international nurses in the last financial year to plug hospital staffing shortages, with as many as 10% coming from so-called “red-list” countries where health staff should not be actively recruited.
Britain has long hired from abroad to staff its state-run National Health Service (NHS), and its vote to leave the European Union in 2016 meant the number of EU staff has dropped sharply in recent years.
In the year to March, nearly half of the 52,148 nurses, midwives and nursing associates who joined the British register were internationally educated, according to the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC). Nearly 3,500 came from Nigeria, which is on the the World Health Organization’s safeguards list.
The WHO has warned that poorer countries are increasingly losing healthcare workers to wealthier countries, and has flagged concern over active recruitment in some countries.
“The requirement of (WHO) member states is not to actively recruit from these countries, but what the data can’t tell us is how these nurses have come to be on the UK register,” he said.
But never fear, the West (in this case Great Britain but certainly everyone and anyone else) proposes to fix it with money. Just not money spent at home developing the resources they need.
On Friday Britain announced 15 million pounds in funding to strengthen the health workforce in Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana, citing low staff numbers in their health systems and high unemployment among health workers.
Britain’s health service has endured a tough winter, creaking under high demand, staffing shortages, strike action over pay and long waits for operations and ambulance visits.
It pledged in 2019 to have 50,000 more nurses in the NHS in England by next year, and health minister Steve Barclay said the government is on course to hit that target and would publish a new long-term workforce plan shortly. The Health Foundation estimates that NHS England has 43,000 nursing vacancies.
“The target itself has been a driver for international recruitment because it’s the relatively quick fix way of getting nurses into the system,” he said. “Will we have to carry on at high levels of international recruitment to try and fill vacancies in the short term? Yes we will.”
Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves. The sun never sets on the British Empire.
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