This archive report was first published on 23 April 2020.
As the UK grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, the vital contribution of foreign staff in British hospitals has come under the spotlight. According to parliamentary figures published last July, around 153,000 workers out of 1.2 million NHS staff are non-British, accounting for 13.1 percent of all staff for whom a nationality is known.
Among the most common 16 nationalities of people working for the NHS were Indian (21,207), Nigerians (6,770) and Zimbabweans (4,049). The health service think tank, the King's Fund, calculates that beyond the NHS, around one in six of the 1.5 million people working in adult social care in the private sector are from overseas.
“The NHS depends on the important contribution that they make,” said Alex Baylis, assistant director of policy at King's. “This has come into sharp focus in recent weeks, as all NHS staff have gone above and beyond the call of duty to look after patients who are ill with coronavirus.”
However, the role of non-British workers, and particularly those from the European Union, has been brought into sharp focus because of Brexit, where immigration was a key issue. Britain is reliant on such workers at a time when the future of many of those people to remain in the country is uncertain after the country left the EU in January.
“Nobody has asked me where I come from in the last few weeks,” said Joan Pons Laplana, a 45-year-old Spanish national and senior digital charge nurse working on the frontline in an intensive care unit treating coronavirus patients at Sheffield Teaching Hospital in the north of England. “This is a welcome change, but I am a sceptic. It will last for a while, but then we will go back to blaming migrants for anything.”
Since the 2016 referendum set Britain on a turbulent path to leaving the EU, there have been doubts about how the NHS will cope with any potential exodus of staff as a result. Freedom of Information figures published in November revealed that in three years since the referendum, more than 11,600 NHS staff from the EU had left the UK, including 4,783 nurses.
Already the urgency of coronavirus has seen a shift in government policy. Last month, the Home Office announced that 2,800 frontline NHS workers, whose visas are due to expire this year, would be extended for 12 months free of charge so they could “focus on fighting coronavirus”. But political opponents say that is not enough.
