NHS at risk as overseas doctors put off by racism

Foreign doctors and nurses are increasingly shunning the NHS because anti-migrant rhetoric and rising racism have created “a hostile environment”, the leader of Britain’s medics has warned.

- Denis Campbell Health policy editor

The health service is being put at risk because overseas health professionals increasingly see the UK as an “unwelcoming, racist” country, in part because of the government’s tough approach to immigration, Jeanette Dickson said.

Record numbers of foreign-born doctors are quitting the NHS and the post-Brexit surge in those coming to work in it has stalled. At the same time, the number of nurses and midwives joining the NHS has fallen sharply over the past year.

Dickson is the chair of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, which represents the professional interests of the UK and Ireland's 220,000 doctors, including GPs, surgeons, anaesthetists and A&E specialists.

She said that without the contribution of foreign doctors and nurses the NHS “could quite easily fall over” and find itself without “a critical mass of people there to run the service safely”.

Foreign-born doctors and nurses were being put off by antagonism by politicians towards migrants, media coverage of immigration, the racist abuse of international medical graduates by NHS colleagues and racist aggression by patients toward minority ethnic NHS staff, she said.

“My feeling is we are creating a culture where the rhetoric is ‘foreigner bad’. If you have never visited Britain and are looking at our media, the social media, press media, what our politicians are reported as saying, I think that it’s not unreasonable to see that as a hostile environment,” Dickson, an NHS consultant clinical oncologist, told the Guardian.

“They see attacks on synagogues, they see anti-Muslim protests. They see the rhetoric that immigration is bad, [that] immigration is a major problem for the country.

“Why would you go somewhere where people are going: ‘We don’t need you, we don’t want you’? For them that makes Britain appear unwelcoming, racist. The prevalence of [hostility to migrants] is significantly more [than] 10 years ago.”