Close up shot of a medical professional placing a pulse oximeter on the finger of a hospitalized … [+]
Hospitals in the U.K. and a handful of other high-income countries are hiring nurses from countries with serious recruitment problems of their own.
Experts from one of these countries — Ghana — say hospitals are struggling to treat patients as staff leave for jobs abroad, the BBC reported Tuesday.
Ghana’s healthcare sector is facing severe workforce shortages as the country endures an economic crisis.
It’s one of a number of so-called “red list” countries the World Health Organisation says have “the most pressing health workforce needs.”
This means that trusts — the organisations that run public hospitals in the U.K. —aren’t supposed to “actively” recruit from these countries. International hiring campaigns should not target them, for example.
But that doesn’t prevent trusts from hiring staff from these countries altogether. And it’s a practice that appears to be on the rise.
In 2022, more than 1,200 nurses left Ghana for roles in the U.K. last year, according to the BBC’s investigation.
And between 2019 and 2022, there was a 10-fold increase in the number of nurses coming to work in British hospitals from “red list” countries, the Royal College of Nursing previously reported.
The U.K. is itself facing longstanding healthcare workforce shortages, exacerbated by rising demand and the covid-19 pandemic.
Brexit may well have dampened the country’s appeal among healthcare staff from other parts of Europe, with research from the Nuffield Trust showing a drop in the recruitment of EU medical, nursing and social care staff since the country voted to leave the union in 2016.
Over the last six months, doctors, nurses and other staff have staged strikes over pay they argue is too low to sustain an adequate workforce.
But serious as these staffing problems are, they are not as severe as those facing countries on the “red list.”
Staff shortages in Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria are currently so serious that the U.K. government plans to invest £15 million ($18.6 million) in boosting these countries’ workforces.
Despite this, as the BBC reports, recruitment to British hospitals is a factor in these shortages.
Greater Accra Regional Hospital’s head of nursing, Gifty Aryee, said 20 nurses from her facility’s intensive care unit had moved to hospitals in the US and UK over the last six months.
She told the outlet: “Care is affected as we are not able to take any more patients. There are delays and it costs more in mortality — patients die.”
President of Ghana’s Nurses and Midwives Association, Perpetual Ofori-Ampofo, added that it was “not ethical” for countries like the UK to hire nurses from her country.
The country is losing a disproportionate amount of its more experienced nurses, she explained.
“The numbers of professional nurses compared to trainee or auxiliary nurses is a problem for us,” she said.
International Council of Nurses chief executive officer Howard Catton told the outlet: “We have intense recruitment taking place, mainly driven by six or seven high-income countries, from countries which are some of the most vulnerable, which can ill-afford to lose their nurses.”
Criticising “ad hoc” deals that do not “properly recompensate” these countries, he warned wealthier nations against “trying to create a veneer of ethical respectability rather than a proper reflection of the true costs to the countries which are losing their nurses.”