RCN responds to report on health and social care staff born outside the UK
Responding to the Nuffield Trust report on health and social care staff born outside the UK Dame Donna Kinnair, Chief Executive and General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing said:
“Nursing colleagues from overseas have long been an invaluable part of the health and social care workforce in the UK.
"But Nuffield’s new analysis shows the extent to which our health and social care services now depend on staff from abroad, with fully half the increase in workforce numbers over the last 10 years coming from staff from overseas.
"Continuing over-reliance on staff from abroad in this way is both unsustainable and unethical in the long term.
“Instead we need urgent measures to increase the size of our domestic workforce. The policy that would make the biggest difference would be to restore financial help, both tuition fees and maintenance grants, for nursing students in England - we are calling for at least £1 billion of funding to be reinvested in nurse higher education in order to increase the supply of tomorrow’s nurses”.
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