AIBU to question relying on overseas-trained NHS staff over training our own?

Yes, I saw her post. Apparently her daughter had spent years training to be a midwife and there were no jobs for her year group at the end of it, plus they were in a load of student debt, it’s devastating. I just can’t wrap my head around it.

And how can that poster tell they’re not good enough just by an interview if the trust doesn’t employ them? Maybe they’re just bad at interviews?

Of course it will.

I am out of the NHS. No more thank you but my trust was very happy to employ non-British staff.

Many from overseas did not know their rights and worked much harder than British staff.
Incidentally there are jobs in the NHS that few Brits actually want to take in wards and they are filled by non-British staff.

@Whatifitallgoesright the bulk of the 156k jobs you listed are temporary seasonal agricultural jobs. They’ve always used migrant labour for this. If you cancel the visas like we did for Covid you will have the crops rotting in the fields and grocery prices going up.

The rest are a few hundred here and there and that covers 3yrs, you can’t really argue that 2,000 programmers per year are going to make a huge difference to unemployment in the millions.

The NHS is underfunded. They can’t find jobs because the NHS is cutting jobs and currently has a hiring freeze so vacancies go unfilled.

On a side note 7.5% of our ‘own’ graduates are foreign students.

These stats are pretty alarming!
"I think this is important. The government wants to PAY companies £5,000 to reimburse visa costs for each foreign worker they hire! so, I thought we'd dig into just some of the 'skilled' worker roles the government has approved, that British people could easily do between March 2024 and March 2026.

At a time when unemployment is rising, this is just a short list of 156,873 JOBS British people including graduates did NOT get and overseas visa were issued.

From the Home Office’s own visa data.

▪️34,274 farm workers
▪️21,738 horticultural workers
▪️14,277 elementary agricultural workers
▪️6,502 agricultural and related trades
▪️6,842 generalist medical practitioners
▪️6,047 programmers and software developers
▪️4,205 food preparation and hospitality workers
▪️4,193 care workers and home carers
▪️2,903 nursing professionals
▪️2,895 engineering professionals
▪️2,391 sales, marketing
▪️2,257 teachers
▪️2,000 sales and business development managers
▪️1,509 mechanical engineers
▪️916 marketing, sales and advertising directors
▪️885 construction and building trades
▪️876 advertising and marketing roles
▪️801 retail and wholesale managers
▪️775 marketing and commercial managers
▪️768 shopkeepers and sales supervisors
▪️714 vehicle trades
▪️671 office managers and admin supervisors
▪️638 business sales executives
▪️504 mechanics and electricians
▪️466 butchers
▪️377 restaurant and catering managers
▪️261 retail and wholesale sales supervisors
▪️240 carpenters and joiners
▪️238 office managers
▪️235 catering and bar managers
▪️177 secretarial and related occupations
▪️166 electricians and electrical fitters
▪️145 sales administrators
▪️128 book-keepers, payroll and wages clerks
▪️103 customer service managers
▪️74 hotel and accommodation managers
▪️74 bakers and flour confectioners
▪️67 housekeepers and related occupations
▪️64 hairdressing and beauty salon managers

Westminster is not listening! and is allowing Britain to import labour for jobs British people could be trained to do. Chefs? Butchers? sales staff? bookeepers? shopkeepers? Farm workers? Mechanics? Hospitality staff? seriously???

Why are employers allowed to say there is a “shortage” of skills when there clearly isn't. And why is the government incentivising foreign work visas we dont need? 🚨

In my trust, we haven’t recruited specifically from abroad for the last two years. We take in 2 cohorts of newly qualified midwives in September and February. It’s rare that band 6 midwife jobs come up
unless they are specialised roles or specific teams. We do take overseas midwives on the preceptorship programmes, which have slightly different requirements to pass. The majority have been nurses for a long time prior to training as a midwife and that has massive benefits over standalone midwifery new graduates.

To whoever asked the question about why are they allowed to qualify if they aren’t good enough for the job? Two reasons. A tiny number have fallen under failure to fail, and the rest have passed all their individual competencies under direct supervision but being good at individual skills does not make you a good midwife on the ground. People will say interview pressure can knock some people but being a safe and effective midwife means you have to be able to work well and safely in sometimes extremely pressured situations. If you can’t answer questions about your basic knowledge or scenarios in front of two interviewers, how are you advocating for a woman to a team of doctors who don’t agree with you, in an emergency situation? It takes a certain kind of person to be a midwife (and I imagine a nurse too) and holding a midwifery degree does not make you a midwife in my opinion.

The numbers have dropped but trusts are refocussing their efforts to get the numbers back up again. Since Brexit the focus moved from Eastern Europe to Africa and Phillipines. Now because of the change in governemnt policy the focus is moving to India and Pakistan.

The premise of this thread is misleading as the numbers recruited from abroad has dropped massively over the last couple of years due to general recruitment freezes and being able to recruit from the UK. Most overseas staff now working here did not arrive recently, they will have been here 2+ years.

The exception is medicine, because it costs a lot post grad to train specialist doctors. It remains more cost effective to recruit more senior medics (consultants, surgeons) internationally rather than training UK ones.

This. When Tony Blair increased the number of universities training doctors in the early 2000s he faced opposition from the BMA. They had to give out some very substancial pay increases to GPs and consultants get the BMA to agree to it.

Nobody wants to be a care worker. It pays minimum wage and is mostly zero hours contracts with some terrible pay and conditions. It is not unusual for carers to not be paid for the time spent getting form one appointment to the next. It's also not a job anyone can do. It involves working with elderly and vulnerable people.

This. I worked in the NHS for over a decade (not as a nurse but as an allied health professional) - I left and I'd never go back now and I wouldnt advise anyone to go into it. We were constantly short staffed, the pressure was immense and the pay was bloody pathetic for the level of responsibility we had.

It's all very well saying more brits should go into it but why would they considering all the stress of it? why should they?

We used to pay student nurses - back in the last century, when I trained. It wasn’t a degree course, and we were counted as members of staff, not supernumerary staff, on the wards, and we learned by doing.

I know that nursing is a more technical and high powered profession now, and a degree is necessary, but we should be at least subsidising the costs of getting that degree, in order to encourage people to go into the profession.

We've never trained enough doctors here. About half of all doctors registered with the GMC trained overseas.

This is quite deliberate from the medical profession. By declining to train the numbers we need, their value is kept artifically high. It's why a salaried GP in the NHS is paid abøut twice that of one in France.

There simply are not enough people training to be nurses. It's a 3 year degree course. There used to be a bursary which covered some of the costs but that was removed in 2017 so nursing students have to fund the course in the same way as other students.

I agree with the points on this thread and would have thought this is where a Labour Govt would excel; seems to me the Tories were trying to underfund and destroy the NHS so of course the NHS was forced to look overseas.

Same goes for doctors - if we need them let's fund them, give them study at a cut price and ensure they are committed to it for 5-10 years or something.

My husband recently had surgery done by a fantastic Palestinian specialist surgeon which obviously we were both incredibly grateful for, but in the back of my mind there was a level of guilt that this wonderful doctor was here in the UK saving our lives and not in Palestine which one could argue needs and deserves his care and dedication more? Its a tricky one definitely

And point 3, it continues to lead to .massive brain drain in those countries which sevelry affects their already struggling healthcare sectors leading to continued dependence on foreign countries for aid.

Or example Nigeria is a big source of nurses and doctors to the NHS has 29 - 38 doctors per 100,000 people while the UK has 310 - 340 per 100,000. And the numbers in countries like Nigeria continue to drop and drop. Of course this causes serious issues in those countries with very very poor healthcare and look at what's happening in Congo as they struggle to contain the recent Ebola outbreak.

Now I'm not saying the UK is entirely at fault here, doctors face poor conditions in those countries with poor pay, corruption, poor facilities etc so they are attracted by the higher pay in the NHS but for the NHS this is purely a way to get cheaper resources to prop up the struggling NHS.

It also has the long term risk of the UK losing the capability to build and maintain its local talent due to dependency on cheaper doctors and nurses from abroad. It's very hard to rebuild your talent pipeline than it is to destroy it.

We see this also in the University sector where there has been over dependency on international students to the extent many universities can't survive without them but now many UK universities provide very poor value and service and you can see quality decline in many universities because they are his money mills to prop up the sector and subsidize local students.

These are bandaid solutions that will work short term but are not long term permanent solutions and infact lead to more serious issues in the medium to long term.

There was a midwife student on here I think last week saying she's now been told there will no longer be a guaranteed job when she qualifies. It is wrong. If we train people and they pass the standards they should be given a job above immigrants.

Oh absolutely it was the wrong call! I completely agree. My mum looked into doing her training after I completed mine but once she found out it was now charged she couldn't make it work financially.