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Rising racism blamed for collapse in number of foreign nurses coming to UK

Release Date
2025-12-05
Media
The Guardian
Summary
The number of overseas nurses and midwives coming to the UK has fallen sharply. Between April and September, only 6,321 international recruits joined the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) register—about half the 12,534 who joined during the same period in 2024. More foreign staff are also leaving the UK, worsening the NHS’s existing workforce shortages and threatening longer patient waiting times.

Health experts and NHS staff groups attribute this decline to rising anti-migrant hostility in Britain and the government’s stricter immigration policies. In particular, Labour’s decision to double the wait time for overseas workers to apply for permanent residency or access benefits—from five to ten years—has been criticised as appeasing Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK party.

Unions warn that losing internationally trained nurses—who have long been essential to the NHS—would be disastrous. Health secretary Wes Streeting has also spoken about a resurgence of “ugly” racism reminiscent of the 1970s and 1980s, which foreign staff increasingly face.

The NMC notes that international recruits may also be choosing other countries due to higher pay or because the NHS is focusing more on training domestic staff. The decline is most pronounced among key source countries: arrivals from India fell 58%, from the Philippines 68%, from Nigeria 28%, and from Ghana 9%.

Despite these trends, the total number of nurses, midwives, and nursing associates on the UK register has reached a record 860,801, with men making up a record 12% (96,593). The NMC concludes that the era of rapid international recruitment appears to be coming to an end.
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United Kingdom

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