The exodus of doctors and nurses from Romania cannot be stopped, and it is becoming a worrying phenomenon for the healthcare system in the country.
Many of these healthcare workers have arrived in the United Kingdom. As a result, the National Health Service (NHS) announced that the number of foreign employees coming to the island in the last five years has doubled, and doctors and nurses from Romania are among the top 10 countries who make up the NHS workforce.
An analysis from the NHS showed that 34 percent of new U.K. doctors from 2021 were initially trained abroad. This is a significant increase from 2015, when the percentage was just 18 percent, according to the Daily Mail.
The figures representing the number of nurses are similar, rising to 34 percent in 2021 from 7 percent in 2015. Thus, one in three doctors and nurses joining the U.K. healthcare system in 2021 were recruited from abroad.
NHS data shows that the share of medical staff recruited from abroad almost doubled between 2014 and 2021.
Foreign doctors moving to Britain in 2021 consisted of 30,638 from India, 17,005 from Pakistan, and 10,003 from Nigeria. Additionally, 8,776 came from Egypt, 4,892 from Ireland, 4,880 from South Africa, 4,421 from Greece, 3,917 from Sudan, 3,886 from Italy, and 3,408 from Romania.
For nurses, the proportion of those trained in the U.K. was only 61 percent last year. Those recruited from abroad reached 39 percent; the top countries were India (21,357), the Philippines (17,825), Nigeria (4,722), Zimbabwe, Ghana, Australia, Italy, Ireland, and Romania (663).
It is noticeable that the number of Romanian doctors and nurses who ended up working in U.K. exceeds that from other developed Western countries, such as Germany, France, and Spain.
According to Romanian statistics, over 40,000 doctors left the country abroad in the last 10 years to practice in Germany, France, Belgium, Great Britain, and other countries.
