The main hospital trust in Brighton and Hove said that immigration rules are preventing nurses from coming to plug some of the staff shortages at the Royal Sussex County Hospital.
The trust – Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals – has almost 200 vacancies for nurses in two key grades or bands.
Sixty of the vacancies are due to be filled by nurses from the Philippines. There are already more than 100 Filipino nurses among the trust’s 8,000 staff.
But a tightening up of immigration rules by the Home Office has so far prevented the nurses from being allowed to travel here to start work.
A cap on numbers introduced by the Home Office led to the trust being told in July and August that it could not bring the 60 nurses from the Philippines to Brighton.
As a knock-on effect it is also pushing up the hospital trust’s bill for agency and bank nurses by hundreds of thousands of pounds a month.
From April to July the trust’s nursing and midwifery budget was £2.75 million overspent with a £6 million overspend on agency and bank nurses alone.
And another change to immigration rules could lead to almost 30 nurses being sent home once they have spent six years working here, including at least 16 Filipinos.
The Royal Sussex is one of a number of hospitals across the country to have been affected by the tightening up of immigration rules.
Ten trusts are believed to have written to the Home Secretary Theresa May urging a solution to the problem.
The shortage of nurses stems not only from the changes to immigration rules. In part it is a result of the requirement to staff wards more safely and to publish figures showing whether this has happened.
But it also reflects a gap between the number of nurses being trained and the number leaving the profession each year.
Attempts to encourage nurses who have left the profession to return have not been successful with just ten coming back across the area. And only about one in four of the nurses who train locally take up a job with the trust.
So the Royal Sussex has looked abroad. It has targeted nurses from Ireland and Portugal as well as the Philippines in recent years, although this also comes at a price.
The hospital trust’s board was told, when approving a recruitment and retention strategy, that “due to the lack of available UK-based qualified nurses, agencies have been used to recruit overseas, from Portugal and Ireland, at a significant charge per successful candidate (ie, £3,000 band 5 nurses and £3,500 band 6 nurses)”.
And a report to the hospital trust board meeting last month said: “There continues to be a delay with internationally recruited staff.
“This is due to the NMC (Nursing and Midwifery Council) registration process which, to date, we have seen take over five months in many incidences for staff from Europe and even longer for those coming from the Philippines.
“The Philippine nurses have to pass a competency based test online before they can submit their documents to the NMC.
“If they fail twice, they have to wait another six months before they can take it again.
“A further delay has recently arisen with the reduced availability of certificates of sponsorship.
“Nationally, 60 Philippine nurses are ready to start at BSUH in the next few months but we are not able to bring them into the country.
“From offer to commencement can range from six weeks (if they are already registered with the Nursing and Midwifery Council) to ten months and ongoing.”
In a statement yesterday (Thursday 10 September) the trust said: “To ensure we provide the safest possible care, we have invested significantly in increasing our nursing workforce since April 2014 and we now have the most number of nurses working at the trust that we have ever had.
“Since December of last year over 300 trained nurses from the local area and the rest of the UK have started with us, with a further 125 international nurses starting.
“Compared to this time last year, we have 175 more substantive nursing and midwifery staff and there is more to come with large influxes of new recruits expected to start in September and October.
“We still have almost 200 vacancies for band 5 and 6 nurses and, due to the shortage of trained nurses across the country, we continue to look abroad to appoint nurses as well as locally and nationally.
“There are currently 60 nurses in the Philippines ready to come to work for the trust but they cannot get certificates of sponsorship to enable them to apply for a visa.”
The number of certificates of sponsorship are capped each month by the Home Office and the cap has been reached for the past two months.
The trust has not yet heard whether its efforts will succeed this month or whether, once again, the nurses will be left in limbo.
