Medical workforce: UK government is accused of “unethical” recruitment from “red list” nations

The NHS is relying too much on recruiting doctors and nurses from countries that have their own significant healthcare workforce shortages instead of training and retaining enough domestic staff, a damning report has concluded.

By November 2024 around one in eleven NHS doctors in England (9%) held a nationality from a “red list” country—those listed by the World Health Organization (WHO) as having such a shortage of staff that other countries should not actively recruit from them—found the report from the Nuffield Trust think tank and academics from the University of Sheffield, Queen’s University Belfast, and the University of Michigan.1

The report, funded by the Health Foundation, found that since Brexit all UK countries had relied heavily on very high migration of healthcare staff from outside the EU.

Mark Dayan, Nuffield Trust policy analyst and Brexit programme lead, told The BMJ, “Yet again, British failure to train enough healthcare staff has been bailed out by those trained overseas. Recruiting on this scale from countries WHO believes have troublingly few staff is difficult to justify ethically for a still much wealthier country.” Dayan added that the strategy to plug gaps with migrant workers was also “risky” owing to shifting immigration policies and the unpredictable global labour market.

The figures prompted Wes Streeting, secretary of state for health and social care, to accuse the …