Foreign medics shunning NHS because of anti-migrant rhetoric, says top doctor | NHS

Foreign doctors and nurses are increasingly staying away from the NHS as anti-immigrant rhetoric and rising racism are creating a “hostile environment”, the leader of British medics has warned.

Jeanette Dickson said healthcare was being put at risk because overseas healthcare professionals were increasingly seeing the UK as an “unwelcoming, racist” country, partly due to the government’s hardline approach to immigration.

A record number of foreign doctors are leaving the NHS, and post-Brexit growth in the number of people coming to work in the NHS has also stalled. At the same time, the number of nurses and midwives joining the NHS is increasing. fell sharply over the past year.

Dickson is president of the Academy of Royal Colleges of Medicine, which represents the professional interests of 220,000 doctors in the UK and Ireland, including GPs, surgeons, anesthetists and A&E specialists.

He said that without the input of foreign doctors and nurses the NHS could “easily fail” and leave itself without “a critical mass of people to run the service safely”.

He said foreign-born doctors and nurses were put off by politicians’ hostility towards immigrants, media coverage of immigration, racist abuse of international medical graduates by NHS colleagues and racist aggression by patients towards minority ethnic NHS staff.

Dickson, an NHS consultant clinical oncologist, told the Guardian: “In my opinion, we are creating a culture where there is a discourse of ‘foreign bad’. If you’ve never visited Britain and you look at our media, social media, print media, print media, what our politicians say, I think it’s not unreasonable to see this as a hostile environment.”

“Because [foreign health staff] When we see Britain withdrawing from Europe, ‘we can do this alone’. They see attacks on synagogues, they see anti-Muslim protests. They see the narrative that immigration is bad, [that] Immigration is a big problem for the country.

“Why would you go to a place where people say, ‘We don’t need you, we don’t want you’? It makes Britain seem unwelcoming, racist to them. The prevalence of that is [hostility to migrants] significantly more [than] 10 years ago.”

While the NHS has relied on staff overseas since its founding in 1948, this dependence has reached its highest level. For example, 42% of all doctors in the UK qualified overseas, General Medical Council (GMC) figures show.

Dickson added that the atmosphere towards immigrants in the UK was now so unpleasant that some expat NHS staff did not feel safe in their daily lives.

Selina Douglas, chief executive of the Whittington health trust in London, told a public meeting last month that hospital and community-based staff were experiencing an increase in racism.

Referring to the nurses abroad who have been working here for 25 years, Douglas said, “This staff is subjected to racist harassment in our hospital. My staff spat on them while going up the hill.” [from the tube station].”

In a warning to abusive patients last month, health minister Wes Streeting said “your right to access free healthcare in this country does not come with the freedom to abuse our staff for any reason”. But it is not clear what action the NHS is relying on or the police are taking to prevent patient abuse.

Dickson said workforce data collected by the GMC and the Nursing and Midwifery Council showed that more and more foreign medical and nursing graduates were “voting with their feet” by not coming to the UK or leaving to work elsewhere.

He expressed concerns at the end of a year in which Streeting said NHS staff were often increasingly openly targeted by “1970s, 1980s-style racism” and an NHS trust leader expressed alarm that Black and Asian staff visiting patients’ homes were being “deliberately intimidated” by the installation of UK flags.

He claimed the Labor government was partly responsible for the doctors’ decision not to come to the UK because it prioritized UK medical graduates over those qualified abroad in allocating places in specialist medical training. This is a major issue, alongside pay, in the junior doctor dispute between ministers and the British Medical Association in England.

Dickson suggested this might be short-sighted, given the global shortage of doctors who can earn more money and benefit from easier working lives outside the UK.

He added: “There is a population that is moving away from internationalism because of Brexit. There is also a foreign minister who says ‘We will give UK graduates priority in terms of employment.’

“There was always a group [of doctors] Those who return to their country of origin or another country. It’s more worrying for me [is] The number of overseas graduates who want to enter the country is also decreasing. And I think this partly has to do with the prioritization argument that is being made.

“Doctors, like nurses, have many portable skills. There is a shortage internationally.” [of both]. “If the country doesn’t seem as hospitable or people don’t feel as safe and Canada, Australia and New Zealand are opening their doors more, then I don’t find it surprising that people are leaving the country.”

He warned that anti-immigrant sentiments expressed by unnamed politicians could lead to many foreign staff resigning and the NHS could “easily collapse”.

“If we have significant outward migration, and if we perpetuate the narrative nationally that immigration is bad, and also ‘we prioritize UK graduates’, then I worry that we might get to the point of not having a critical mass of people there to run the service safely.”

He said Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Streeting should make it clear to the public that foreign-born frontline NHS doctors and nurses are welcome because “they provide an invaluable service to the NHS and their colleagues as well as to patients, because without them we would all be completely snowed in. We absolutely need to make those already in the UK feel welcome and go out of our way to make them feel welcome.”

Responding to Dickson’s comments, a Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said: “The NHS benefits greatly from its international staff and we will continue to support and attract talented overseas staff who are willing to dedicate their time, energy and skills to healthcare.

“Discrimination against patients and staff undermines everything our healthcare stands for and the NHS has zero tolerance for racism.”

They added: “However, failure to train sufficient numbers of medical professionals has left us reliant on international recruitment to fill gaps. It is right that British taxpayers see a return on their investment in training home-grown medical talent, which is why our 10-year health plan commits to prioritizing UK medical graduates and others who have worked significant periods of time in specialist training roles in the NHS.”