The number of EU and European Free Trade Association (EFTA) nurses coming to the UK has significantly dropped since Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016. A report by the Nuffield Trust showed that nurses coming from Europe to Britain decreased by 28 percent from 38,992 in September 2016 to 28,007 in September 2021.
Mark Dayan, Brexit programme leader and a co-author of the report, said: “Before the EU referendum, the UK heavily relied on EU staff. Now we can’t get the same people due to free movement restrictions.”
A separate study
by the University of Surrey published in November, highlights the financial implications Britain’s falling EU nursing workforce has had on the NHS. It estimates that the cost of having fewer EU nurses in Britain is £61.9m a year. In the three years following the referendum, the loss of 100 EU nurses per 1,000 staff has increased emergency readmission rates for elective patients by 2.2 percent annually. This amounts to just short of 30,000 readmissions per year, costing the NHS £61.9m annually, the researchers found.
Dr Giuseppe Moscelli, a co-author and principal investigator of the ‘Foreign Nurses and Hospital Quality: Evidence from Brexit’ report, said that the research confirmed that NHS hospitals saw a significant decrease in new EU nurses, and as a result, “the quality of care for planned treatments deteriorated.”