The UK poaching nurses from countries struggling to cope with coronavirus is unethical

It feels like deja vu, as for the second time since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic we have an announcement promising an increase in nursing workforce. This time it’s to ensure that there will be a sufficient number to deal with the anticipated winter surge in demand for hospital beds. On the face of it this sounds sensible. At least there is some attempt at workforce planning and trying to mitigate the obvious problems that lie ahead. But as with so many aspects of the government’s response to the crisis, this move is not just flawed, but profoundly unethical.

The cunning plan is to poach nurses from countries like India – nations that need all the help they can get in tackling their population’s increasing exposure and mortality due to the coronavirus. Compare the numbers: while in the UK we have seen a rise in infections to a few thousand a day, India is reporting close to a hundred thousand a day. Hardly a time to be exporting your own nurses to the UK.  

Similar to reports of how America and others are hoarding potential vaccines, this unethical plundering of another country’s scarce nursing resource is done without any shame, all in the name of protecting our own interests.

This unethical position wouldn’t be necessary if we had trained and employed a sufficient number of nurses prior to the pandemic. But cutting training places for nursing is a quick and easy way to save government spending in the name of austerity. Unlike the instant purchase of a commodity, professional nurses take three years to be trained. So although the government has decided now to spend money on nursing, they can’t get the numbers they need from the current pool in the UK.

In fairness it is not just Conservative governments who are guilty, Labour too have reduced then increased the numbers of nurses in training. Not in relation to NHS need, but fiscal belt tightening. The result is the constant yo-yoing of numbers in training, making workforce planning and delivery challenging. At any time it is believed one in 10 nursing posts is vacant. This is a false economy as the nursing shortages in hospitals and other health services are inevitably plugged by expensive agency staff, which more than offsets any projected savings in cutting nurse training places.

The other aspect that health ministers seem unable to grasp is that just funding additional nurse training posts fails to appreciate how nurses are trained. Unlike most undergraduates, nurses spend 50 per cent of their time in practice and this requires placement capacity. Capacity is always tight but Covid-19 has stretched the training circuit to its absolute limits. 

The NHS is having to respond to constantly changing demands on its services during this pandemic. This means the focus of wards and services changes quickly, one day a ward is for older people, the next it is reconfigured to take Covid cases. These fast-moving changes make it difficult to accommodate student learners who need the same level of protection as their qualified colleagues. Minimising movement of staff, including students, is an important way of protecting both nurse and patient from the Covid virus.  

So even if the money and will is there to increase nursing numbers, there are significant operational challenges in delivering this. It is clearly wrong to plunder another’s country’s health resources, particularly as it wouldn’t be necessary if we had planned and invested in our own health workforce to begin with.  

Far from boasting about how they will recruit thousands of additional nurses from abroad, the government should reflect on how it got itself into this position in the first place. Sadly, the ability to learn and not repeat mistakes is even rarer than nurses at the moment.