Australia and New Zealand luring UK healthcare providers saps NHS staff rolls

Rush to Antipodean posts as staff shortages and inadequate investment takes toll on state system on its 75th anniversary

UK-trained nurses accounted for one in five foreign-trained nurses in New Zealand and one in four in Australia. PA

Australia recruits almost a quarter of its foreign nurses from the UK, as an exodus of Britain’s largely NHS-trained medical professionals compounds the staff crunch.

The UK public health service is struggling to recruit locally trained staff, and a new report by the King’s Fund think tank found “strikingly” low levels of clinical staff or nurses who had trained in the country with the NHS.

Meanwhile data showed the numbers of UK-trained healthcare workers employed overseas in New Zealand and Australia to be in the double digits.

Other factors damaging UK provision, including low supplies of beds and diagnostics technology, meant the NHS was performing “substantially less well” in life expectancy and preventable deaths than other developed countries.

UK-trained nurses accounted for one in five foreign-trained nurses in New Zealand and one in four in Australia. By contrast, 1.1 per cent of foreign-trained nurses in the UK came from Australia and 0.3 per cent from New Zealand.

The study compared the NHS to healthcare systems across 18 other developed countries, including Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and the US.

The UK recruits 15.4 per cent of its nurses from overseas, which is higher than average, but lower than New Zealand’s 26.6 and Australia’s 18.1.

The recruitment of overseas-trained doctors in all three countries was even higher: 42.6 per cent for New Zealand, 32.5 for Australia and 30.3 for the UK.

All three countries relied on nurses from India and the Philippines, “however, New Zealand and Australia also recruit heavily from the UK”, the report found.

Nurses and junior doctors in the UK have been striking since December last year, calling for pay rises as many are stretched by additional working hours and staff shortages.

The report found that while specialist doctors were paid higher compared to other countries in the report, the pay for nurses was below average.

Former NHS staff have been sharing their experiences of leaving the UK for jobs overseas on online platforms such as Twitter, Reddit and TikTok.

Matt Morgan, a Welsh doctor who spent a year working in Australia, shared advice that could stop a “fatal haemorrhage of staff” from the NHS in social media post.

He said that Australian conditions were better than those in the UK and gave advice on how the country could better retain staff, including simplifying out-of-hours payment, tax breaks and rewards for long service.

“The NHS uses complex formulae for out-of-hours payments. Australia links shifts to pay – work a bank holiday one week, get paid more the next. This encourages flexibility, swaps, fairness and feelings of worth as work is linked to an outcome,” he wrote on Twitter in January.

“Mini-retirements, extended breaks or using small amounts regularly helps reduce burnout, sickness rates and rewards commitment with more than a fake gold clock. It also helps retention in the sector.”

One anonymous junior doctor wrote that they left for Australia as soon as they had completed their foundation training.

“The stories of greener pastures in the Land Down Under, where the sun is always shining and pay is significantly higher were too good to turn down,” the person wrote on Reddit.

“The staffing levels are much better, nursing teams are excellent here compared to back in the UK. Overtime pay is pretty good.”

The NHS was the first public health system to provide free health care available to all.

Yet the service is experiencing the most pressures in its history, with a record 7.3 million patients on waiting lists. This includes 320,000 cancer patients waiting for treatment as of June 2022.

The report found that the UK had higher avoidable mortality rates than most of its peers, coming joint third with Belgium after Finland and the US. This included death from cancer, heart attack and strokes.

Critics have accused the Conservative government of underfunding the NHS, following more than a decade of austerity measures since 2010.

The report found that the UK had lower numbers of diagnostics technology compared to other countries, such as CT and MRI scanners, and that this may be contributing to waiting times.

The NHS’s 16.1 CT and MRI scanners per million head of population was the lowest of the countries compared in the report – followed by Canada’s 24.7 and Portugal’s 24.7.

Japan had more than 10 times more scanners per million people than the UK, at 166.7, while the US had more than times more, at 85.4.

Too few scanners can lead to “longer waiting times or under-diagnosis of health conditions”, the report said, while cautioning that too many could be wasteful and that there was no ideal set number.

A public inquiry into the government's handling of the Covid-19 pandemic was launched earlier month, and former finance minister George Osborne last week denied that his austerity policies made the government’s handling of the pandemic worse by underfunding the NHS.

Parts of the UK system have seen historic drops in productivity and number of procedures carried out since the pandemic, in part as a result of staff shortages and the rising number of strikes as staff pursue wage rises to match inflation.

The report found that the UK saw the sharpest fall in cancer-related, hip and knee replacement, and cataract surgery during the pandemic.

About a third of older people with long-term conditions in the UK also reported that they had missed or delayed care because of the pandemic. This share was similar to the Netherlands (32 per cent) but higher than France (22 per cent), Sweden (18 per cent) and Germany (11 per cent).