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- NHS sees 60,000 rise in staff numbers
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03.22.04 (4 years ago)
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NHS sees 60,000 rise in staff numbers
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Brief Details
New official figures suggest that the number of medical staff in the NHS has risen over the year, a fact welcomed by Unison, but it warns that still too many professionals are coming from overseas.
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Unions today welcomed official figures suggesting a rise of 60,000 people working in the NHS over the year to September 2003, an average rise per year of 37,000 since Labour came into power in 1997.
Since that period doctors have increased by an extra 2,527 a year to 77,210, while the number of qualified nurses in the NHS have increased by 10,704 a year to the current level of 364,692, states the Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures.
The number of allied health professionals such as dieticians and occupational therapists have experienced a year on year rise of 1,821 to 55,946 while support staff now number 298,752 – an annual increase of 9,785.
Unison today welcomed the figures saying that the extra nurses, doctors and health professionals was ‘…good news for patients and a welcome relief for staff who work long and hard to deliver patient care.’
However, Karen Jennings, head of health for Unison warned that there were still significant staff shortages with a lot of money being ‘wasted’ on agency workers to cover vacancies.
It also reiterated its concern over the number of nurses the UK takes in from overseas. A Parliamentary question recently suggested that nine years ago 1,623 work permits were issued to overseas health workers, the number for nurses alone is now 27,000:
‘Unison remains concerned about the reliance on international recruitment of trained nurses. Greater efforts must be made to encourage more people to take up a profession in health care or nursing as a career.
‘We could learn some valuable lessons from the '70's, when people were encouraged to come from Commonwealth countries and elsewhere to train in the UK. This would prevent the UK from asset stripping developing countries of a much needed, skilled workforce,’ it said.
However, a report from the BMJ suggested that many universities are struggling to fill places on nursing diploma and degree courses and are recruiting students from overseas to ‘plug the gaps’:
'This may simply lead to students returning overseas again when finished,' it said.
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