The Immigration Skills Charge which was introduced in 2017 on the advice of the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), now requires healthcare employers to pay £1000 upfront for every year of a nurse’s visa that they sponsor. So if an international nurse is being sponsored for a three year visa, a fee of £3000 is payable.

The rationale was that by introducing the IMC, the UK would be forced to find answers to the nursing shortage. However at present, the shortage seems as prevalent as ever and the main outcome seems to have been making international recruitment more expensive than it was previously, at a time when pockets are being stretched by agency locum and bank nursing fees.

Nevertheless, if we break down the IMC, the cost works out at £2.74 a day. Given that the average hourly pay rate for an agency locum is £39 per hour (MAC, 2016) – this works out at just 7% of an hour – or 4.2 minutes of a shift.

Even if we were to adjust this to remove weekends and holidays and put average working days at a conservative estimate of 230 days of the year, this still only works out at £4.35 a day – or 11% of an hour, meaning that by recruiting full time international nurses the money would be covered within 6.6 minutes of a shift.

The point being that although the IMC is certainly unpalatable, and potentially unfair, it is still a drop in the ocean compared to the cost of employing agency locum staff.

Yes there are upfront costs involved in recruiting an international nurse but on average all of these costs are recouped within the first 12 weeks of employing the nurse, when compared against an agency locum.

If you’d like to know more about the costs of international recruitment, you can see a breakdown of what is involved in this: http://bit.ly/2nrjpwz

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