In 2021, 37,035 European doctors worked in the UK. Without Brexit, they would be 41,320 today – or 4,285 more – he explains The Guardian which forwards a study by the Nuffield Trust, an independent health think tank.
The Nuffield Trust blames the current difficulties the National Health Service (NHS) has in recruiting trained GPs from the continent on administrative hurdles around the granting of work visas, career paths and pension rights.
“Although there are currently 11,000 practitioner posts available in UK hospitals, it is deeply disappointing that we are short of over 4,000 European doctors who could be looking after our patients.” comments Kitty Mohan on behalf of the British Medical Association (BMA), the main body for British doctors.
The NHS is particularly short of anaesthetists, paediatricians, psychiatrists and surgeons specializing in cardiology and pulmonology. So many specialties suffering from the situation created by Brexit. “Due to the lack of anesthesiologists, the number of operations that can be performed is currently limited. But we would have 394 more anesthesiologists if the recruitment dynamics of recent years had been maintained”, points out Martha McCarey, of the Nuffield Trust.
Brexit has had even more negative effects on the recruitment of nurses of European origin, notes The Guardian. In 2015-2016, the NHS managed to bring 9,389 trained nurses and midwives to the continent. In 2020-2021, only 663 of these professionals chose to work across the channel. But at the moment, the spectacular decline in European recruitment has been largely offset by the massive influx of nurses from India and the Philippines.