NHS recruitment Manchester: Fewer UK staff joining workforce in Greater Manchester hospital trusts

The share of UK staff joining the NHS in Greater Manchester has been falling over the past seven years, data shows.

BBC Shared Data Unit analysis found that at hospital trusts across the city-region fewer new starters in the health service in 2021 were from the UK than had been the case in 2015.

This broadly mirrors national trends in which the number of UK doctors and nurses coming into the NHS has gone down while recruitment from outside the European Union (EU) has gone up.

The figures have raised concerns about the future of the NHS workforce, with suggestions that the current reliance on bringing in staff from abroad is unsustainable and declining numbers of homegrown doctors and nurses joining the health service means it will struggle to keep up with demand.

The Government, though, has insisted that there are record numbers of doctors in the NHS.

What does the data show for Greater Manchester?

The BBC Shared Data Unit analysed NHS Digital figures for staff joining and leaving a number of trusts across Greater Manchester, with many of them showing declines in the number of employees from the UK joining between 2015 and 2021.

The most notable drop was at Stockport NHS Foundation Trust. In 2015, 83% of staff joining the trust were from the UK, compared to 68% in 2021.

New staff from the UK at Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh (WWL) Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust fell from 86% in 2014 to 76%, while at Tameside and Glossop Integrated NHS Foundation Trust it fell from 88% to 79% in the same time period.

At the same time there were increases in the number of staff joining trusts from the rest of the world, classed as countries outside the EU.

At Stockport, 3% of new employees were from outside the UK and the EU in 2015, but in 2021 that had jumped up to 26%.

At WWL the increase was from 6% to 22%, while at Tameside recruitment levels from outside the EU doubled from 8% in 2014 to 16% in 2021.

Some trusts also showed pronounced dips in EU recruitment levels in the wake of the 2016 Brexit referendum, although numbers have increased again within the last couple of years.

At Stockport, for instance, 15.6% of new staff joining the trust in 2016 were from the EU, but by 2018 this was 5.7% and the following year it was 3.5%.

At specialist cancer hospital The Christie NHS Foundation Trust EU staff accounted for 12% of new staff in 201 but 7.8% in 2017 and 6.6% in 2020.

The picture across Greater Manchester as a whole, though, was not uniform, with some trusts seeing fluctuating levels of EU staff members joining throughout the seven-year period and others seeing the level of new employees from EU member states remain virtually unchanged.

What does the data for England as a whole show?

The BBC analysis of workforce data shows that the share of homegrown doctors and nurses joining England’s NHS is at its lowest for seven years.

The share of UK doctors joining the health service had fallen from 69% in 2015 to 58% last year.  Over the same period, the share of new UK nurses fell from 74% to 61%.

Recruitment of doctors from the rest of the world rose from 18% to 34% over the same period, and that share of international nurses rose from 7% to 34%.

What has been said about this?

While numbers of staff in the NHS overall have increased, critics of the growing international recruitment across England have voiced concerns that this trend cannot continue in the long run.

The British Medical Association (BMA) said the NHS is facing a “workforce crisis”.

Patricia Marquis, Royal College of Nursing (RCN) director for England, said ministers must do more to reduce the "disproportionate reliance" on international recruits.

Kate Shoesmith, deputy CEO at the Recruitment & Employment Confederation (REC), said staff shortages in the NHS were "severe even before the pandemic" but were now "the worst they had ever been".

Danny Mortimer, chief executive of NHS Employers, said it was "high time for the government to commit to a fully-funded, long-term workforce plan for the NHS" to tackle "chronic workforce shortages".

He said "relentless demand" was affecting staff due to vacancies which stood at around 110,000 - "gaps which cannot and should not be filled through international recruitment alone".

What has the Government said?

The Government has insisted there were record numbers of doctors, with a rise of 34% since 2010.

A spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said international recruitment had "long been part of the NHS workforce strategy", with around one in seven staff reporting as non-British.

He said: "The government is committed to ensuring that the number of medical school places is in line with England’s workforce requirements.

"The government has funded an additional 1,500 undergraduate medical school places each year for domestic students in England - a 25% increase over three years - and there are record numbers of medical students in training."