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A repository covering our work on the staffing issues facing the NHS in 2022

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-61230287
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Growth in NHS recruits from abroad prompts concern about over-reliance

In August 2022, we reported how the share of homegrown doctors and nurses joining England's NHS had reached its lowest point in seven years.

Some 58% of doctors joining the health service in 2021 came from the UK, with health bosses increasingly turning to international recruitment. The British Medical Association said the NHS faced a "workforce crisis".

The government, however, insisted there were record numbers of doctors, a rise of 34% since 2010.

While overall numbers had been increasing, critics said declining domestic recruitment was unsustainable to keep pace with demand.

Methodology

We analysed workforce data provided by NHS Digital showing the nationalities of joiners, leavers and staff in post in England’s NHS from 2015 to 2021, to investigate if trends we reported following the Brexit referendum in June 2016 continued.

We also submitted 27 FOI requests to every health board in Scotland and Wales and every health and social care trust in Northern Ireland for similar data and manually inputted those data into a mastersheet. These data cover the period 2015-2020.

What we found

  • We found the share of UK doctors joining the health service had fallen from 69% in 2015 to 58% last year. Over the same period, the share of new UK nurses fell from 74% to 61%.

  • Recruitment of doctors from the Rest of the World rose from 18% to 34% over the same period, and that share of international nurses rose from 7% to 34%.

Get the data

We produced this story pack and this dataset with details of staff leaving and joining each NHS trust in England as well as partial data received from the FOI requests sent within Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

We also produced this website allowing our regional news partners to easily access information for their local trust.

Interviews and quotes

  • Patricia Marquis (she/her), Royal College of Nursing (RCN) Director for England
  • Danny Mortimer (he/him), chief executive of NHS Employers (part of the NHS Confederation)
  • Consultant radiologist Sumaira Babar (she/her), who moved from Karachi in Pakistan to Huddersfield with her young family in October 2021.
  • Dr Amit Kochhar (he/him), British Medical Association (BMA) international committee deputy chair
  • Dr Hajra Usmani (she/her), who left her post as an A&E consultant in Frimley, Surrey, in 2021, to work in a similar role in Medina, Saudi Arabia
  • Dr Alexia Tsigka (she/her), a Consultant Histopathologist at Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals and part-time Deputy Clinical Lead at Cyted in Cambridge. Born in Greece, she was a dual national with a British passport after applying in 2019.
  • The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC)
  • Kate Shoesmith (she/her), Deputy CEO at the Recruitment & Employment Confederation (REC)
  • Dr Kamal Sidhu (he/him), a GP partner working across two practices in County Durham, who moved to England from India but was considering whether he needed to "uproot" his family abroad to care for his father after a heart attack left him housebound

Partner usage

The Shared Data Unit makes data journalism available to the wider news industry as part of the BBC Local News Partnership. Stories written by partners based on this research included:

The story featured online and as a bulletin piece across BBC local and national television and radio through 5 August 2022.

Health correspondent Jim Reed produced television packages for the 1pm TV news and the News Channel while BBC News's health editor Hugh Pym reported the story as the lead on the 10pm TV news. Shared Data Unit journalist Paul Lynch appeared on BBC Radio 4's Today programme and 5 Live Breakfast to discuss the story and also carried out interviews on BBC Radio Tees, BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, BBC Radio Newcastle, BBC Radio Kent and BBC CWR.

The report made headlines for BBC Radio 2, Newsbeat (Radio 1, 1Xtra and Asian Network), Look North (Yorkshire), BBC Radio London, BBC Radio Sheffield, BBC Radio Bristol, BBC Three Counties Radio, BBC Radio WM, BBC Radio Lancashire, BBC Radio Solent, BBC Radio Berkshire, BBC Radio Leeds, BBC Sussex, BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, BBC Radio Merseyside, BBC CWR, BBC Tees, BBC Radio Derby, BBC Radio Devon, BBC Radio Humberside, BBC Essex, BBC Newcastle, BBC Radio Gloucestershire, BBC Hereford and Worcester, BBC Radio Kent, BBC Radio Leicester, BBC Radio Lincolnshire, BBC Radio York, BBC Radio Northampton, BBC Radio Nottingham, BBC Radio Oxford, BBC Radio Shropshire, BBC Somerset, BBC Radio Suffolk, BBC Surrey, BBC Wiltshire, BBC Radio Guernsey, BBC Radio Jersey and BBC Radio Foyle.

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A repository covering our work on the staffing issues facing the NHS in 2022

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-61230287

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health immigration nhs shareddataunit nhs-digital

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