Staff Reporter
NHS bosses in North Wales have been forced to employ 70 Spanish nurses over Skype, due to a UK-wide staffing crisis.
Applicants for positions within the Welsh NHS are so scarce that managers have resorted to interviewing potential candidates via Skype to speed up the process.
Half of the recruited Spaniards have already taken up their positions with the remaining 45 on their way.
A spokesman for the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board in Wales admitted that it was ‘struggling to recruit new recruits from within the UK’.
He added: “We need to attract qualified nurses.
“We do not require staff to learn Welsh as a condition of their employment.
“However, as a health board we do provide active support to staff who wish to learn to speak Welsh and a number of the nurses from Spain have expressed an interest in and have commenced learning the language.”
The news comes as new figures revealed A&E waiting times have reached their lowest levels in England in a decade.
Just 92.6% of patients were seen within the four-hour time limit set by the UK health minister Jeremy Hunt in 2014.
The last two paragraphs in this piece look utterly absurd in light of the latest situation in British A&E departments, where a dozen or more hospitals are currently in crisis because of cuts in social care, preventing patient discharge to the community and a large backlog of patients not able to access a G.P. then turning to A&E for treatment.
As usual, it comes down to uneccessary cuts to public services.
No stefanjo,
it comes down to Brits being trained as nurses with no clause in the training contract that states they must work for the NHS for say at least 10 years. They get their credentials and then b#~^er off abroad.
When I lived in the Netherlands there were lots of UK dentists working there trained at the expense of the mug UK tax payers.
Couldn’t agree more Stuart, but I was only commenting on the last two paragraphs.
It’s a sad indictment of too many people in the UK who do not see it’s their responsibility to look after their aged parents. Here where I live in the Aveyron and indeed in Guadix and in Galicia it is normal for parents to be cared for and not dumped into homes – what does it say about the mentality of far too many Brits?