A quarter of all new nurses in the UK were trained in poorer countries with more severe staffing shortages, openDemocracy can reveal.
Since 2017, 50,000 of the nurses who registered to practise in the UK were trained in countries that have too few of their own nurses to provide the standard of healthcare recommended by the United Nations.
Once registered, nurses can be employed in the NHS or the private sector. It is likely that the majority join the NHS, with 38,000 new NHS England nurses reporting their nationalities as countries with severe staffing shortages in the past five years – though it is not known where they trained.
