The issue lies with a growing concern that the impending government workforce plan might just alienate possibly the most important category of healthcare worker needed by the NHS right now – those from overseas.

For healthcare workers, the forthcoming workforce plan intends to increase training by 77% and goes on to state that “the government must ditch its overseas reliance”. These two aims are both dangerously off course, play into politics, and don’t take into account the statistics we’ve had available for years about which direction we should take with our healthcare worker numbers.

Before even considering ramping up training places, we need to deal with what’s broken. Wage stagnation may be addressed by a change of government, but more importantly, the issue is retention. It’s no secret the impact Covid had on the morale, stamina, mental health and exhaustion levels of nurses who could not go home to their children when things became dire – why? Our numbers were too low. Nurses chose not to abandon their stations, and those pushed beyond the end of their tether simply left the profession – more than 4,000 in the past year alone.

What’s not widely understood is the global competition for healthcare workers right now. Australia, America, Sweden, France and the UAE are all offering pay packages in excess of the UK – that mixed with an attractive work-life balance is a tough act to follow. These countries and others also plan to poach our current healthcare professionals as the competition globally ramps up. We need to understand that healthcare staffing is a completely global and open market where visas flow freely and lifestyle packages lure our professionals abroad. We should know. Over the past decade 50,000 ‘homegrown’ British nurses have moved to Australia, alone.

We’ve already seen the effects of Brexit – a seemingly unwelcome reality for EU nurses. The UK has been short-changed 58,000 nurses if the numbers of those arriving pre-Brexit had continued. While this singular example can’t easily be reversed, the lesson to learn is the cost of not being welcoming and encouraging to overseas healthcare workers.

Our estimation, therefore, is that the ‘77%’ training place increase target is also gross misestimation of anything that will make a material difference. Yes, training will ramp up, but you’d have to double that ratio to factor in the overseas exodus of our healthcare professionals. There is also the shortfall of four to six years wait to get these new recruits onto the front line.

Like solving our energy crisis, everyone agrees a healthy mix of power generation platforms whether solar, wind, nuclear and hydro is the answer. Overseas healthcare professionals address our immediate need, they are permanent staff, negate the need for exorbitant agency reliance (each healthcare professional costs the NHS roughly double the pay of a permanent staff member) – and are ready to work.

We can’t compete with the sun and the beach lifestyle, but can on the highest standards of output, attractive work-life propositions and hopefully better remuneration looking into the future. These numbers prove we have to be a welcoming and attractive as a country, as our need for valuable overseas healthcare workers and their contribution is now an absolute necessity.

Former nurse Febin Cyriac is founder and CEO of Envertiz Consultancy and has recruited 10,000 permanent-role nurses for the NHS.

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