Brighton’s main hospital trust is to recruit nurses from abroad because it cannot attract enough home-grown staff.
Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust has previously recruited nurses and doctors from places such as Ireland, India and the Philippines.
The trust, which runs the Royal Sussex County Hospital, promised to help nurses from overseas to integrate on and off duty when they arrive.
Chief nurse Sherree Fagge said in a newsletter to staff: “We are all aware of the current nursing pressures.
“Some of this is due to changes in activity, dependency and acuity of our patients, increased nursing templates to meet national recommendations and site reconfiguration.”
Work has started on a £420 million modernisation of the Royal Sussex.
Sherree Fagge said: “To help cope with these pressures, in the first nine months of this year we have recruited more nurses than at the same point last year but local and national recruitment is not attracting enough staff.
“Therefore, a decision has been made to recruit nurses from Europe and the Philippines and over the next few months this will be taking place.
“We will be discussing this further at all nursing meetings as it is essential that we all support the new nurses clinically and socially to integrate into BSUH when they arrive.”
You have to ask what is structurally wrong with the profession of nursing when we have struggled for years to train enough nurses, this in recent years despite redundancies, job uncertainty and high unemployment.
Im so disappointed. I been here in the country for 6 years. Im a nurse from the Phillipines and I trained most European nurses in the nursing home but Im only a carer because of the IELTS requirements that I could not get all 7 in band score.
Whats wrong with our Englush in the Philipoines?! English is not our first language but in the school soon as we started to attend schooling, English is the means of communication and almost all subject taught are in English too.