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A Christmas Wish List from MHR to the new Government in power

If you’ve been listening to the news recently, you can’t help but notice the wall to wall election coverage – and the focus on the workforce shortage in the healthcare industry. It’s a hot topic.

The Tories have claimed they will introduce the “NHS Visa” whereas Labour have argued they will recruit an additional 24,000 trained nurses. However neither party deny the integral role of overseas staff in supplementing the domestic workforce.

With this in mind, My Healthcare Recruit would like to write a Christmas Wish List to the new UK Government, specifically with international nurses in mind

The removal of the Resident Labour Market Test (RLMT) for Nurses

Nursing is the only profession on the shortage occupation list that is required to perform the RLMT. This was based upon a recommendation from the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) in 2016 – in part to encourage UK Employers to focus on “home-grown” talent. However this UK “talent pool” has proved elusive for many employers and in the meantime they are forced to spend time they don’t have jumping over administrative hurdles so they can tick the RLMT box. Now that Nursing Certificates of Sponsorship are Unrestricted – why  not remove the RLMT for the profession too?

Removal of the Immigration Skills Charge for Nurses

The Immigration Skills Charge was introduced in 2017 as a tax on hiring from overseas – almost as a penalty for not choosing to source candidates from within the UK talent pool. However as far as international nurses are concerned, the UK healthcare sector would not run without them and we vitally need them to maintain citizen services. So why would we penalise employers financially for looking further afield to solve their problems?

Free priority upgrades on visas

Currently a standard visa processing time is three weeks outside the UK, whereas priority processing is one week. If the government was to provide free priority visa upgrades to the hundreds of international nurses coming into the country each year, it would result in thousands of additional clinical hours being clocked up by permanent members of staff rather than expensive agency staff.

 

Whatever happens with the Election, the focus now has to be finding ‘solutions’ to ‘problems’ and when it comes to the international recruitment of nurses, that’s what we do best at My Healthcare Recruit, in fact we believe that we do it better than anyone else out there.

My Healthcare Recruit supports UK healthcare employers in the public, private, and care sector to find international nurses who are a great fit for their organization, by using market-leading video interviewing tools to connect them to our database of qualified candidates. Our innovative approach makes international candidates easier to find and more cost-effective to source than ever before. Find out more at www.myhealthcarerecruit.com