Britain looks abroad for nurses

Every month, Jenny Ranes gets a potent reminder of why she emigrated from the Philippines: her paycheck.

For the young nurse, it was a salary hike she just couldn't resist. At home, the average nurse makes less than $200 a month. In Britain it can be closer to $2,000.

"I came two years ago because of the opportunities - financially, I'm much better off," she says during a break from duty at a hospital south of London. "If you convert my salary into Philippines money, it's probably six times as much or more. The cost of living is more expensive here, but we can still send money home to our families."

A torrent of foreign nurses has arrived here in recent years, as the ailing National Health Service (NHS) aggressively recruits to plug gaping shortages left after Britain drastically cut back on training nurses in the early 1990s, principally for budgetary reasons.

In the past three years alone, more than 30,000 foreign nurses have been enticed to Britain. This means that it is now more reliant on overseas staff than any other developed country, according to a recent report issued jointly by the International Council of Nurses (ICN), the World Health Organization, and the Royal College of Nursing (RCN).

At Kingston Hospital, more than 10 percent of the 1,150 nursing staff are from overseas - a proportion mirrored in national statistics. Last year more staff was recruited from abroad than from the domestic population.

Few in Britain itself are complaining about the trend, despite increasing controversy in the country about immigration and asylum. But "donor" nations, particularly the Philippines and South Africa, are feeling the effects.

Health officials in both countries say that hospitals are being closed and operations are being canceled because of nursing shortages.

In the Philippines, the exodus has accelerated from around 4,000 nurses a year in the mid-1990s to more than 13,000 in 2001. Last year, 5,600 came to Britain alone. The year before that the figure was 7,200.

"We are already facing a crisis in a good number of hospitals," says Dr. Jaime Galvez Tan, former secretary of health and currently professor at the University of the Philippines College of Medicine in Manila.

"I see the Philippines health system collapsing in five years if there is no mitigating action coming out of countries like the UK," he adds by telephone from Manila. "Hospitals in Mindanao are closing down because the nurses have left."

In South Africa, the picture is bleaker still, with far fewer nurses trained than in the Philippines, but an emigration trend that runs into the thousands each year.

Dr. Kobie Marais, assistant director for human resources at Pretoria Academic Hospital says that a third of her nursing vacancies go unfilled. Fifty percent of nurses who resign head overseas. Last year, more than 2,000 South African nurses came to Britain.

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