Wolverhampton's New Cross Hospital to seek home-grown nurses
An exhaustive search for UK nurses will be carried out by Wolverhampton's New Cross Hospital before it considers recruiting more from overseas, it has been revealed.
The Royal Wolverhampton Trust, which runs the site in Wednesfield, said it wants to make sure it has 'saturated the UK market' before taking on any more foreign nurses.
Earlier this year health bosses brought in 78 nurses from Europe, the majority of which were from Greece and Italy.
To get over any language barriers the new recruits were taught lessons in Black Country phrases to help them understand patients while treating them.
Angela Adimora, director of human resources at the hospital trust, said: "There has been a large focus on oversees nurses, but one thing that has been proposed to me has been – have we saturated the UK market?
"What we are going to do is look at the on-shore market and if we have exhausted that option. Are there possibilities to look domestically? We need to look at this."
Last month the hospital said it needed 122 qualified nurses and 21 health care assistants to be fully staffed. In a bid to meet the shortfall the board has looked at a pool of 200,000 qualified nurses who are no-longer in the profession to see if it can coax them back into nursing.
Hospital chief executive David Loughton said at the time New Cross hospital was one of 17 facilities 'fishing from the same pond'.
Mr Loughton said that it was a challenge getting nurses to move to Wolverhampton because so many of them were opting for jobs based in London.
Cheryl Etches, director of nursing at the trust, said: "The option is there to get former nurses back into the system and return to practice. But should they wish to it is on the individual to fund it.
"We had an example where one person from Scotland had to go to Bournemouth to study to return to nursing – so the profession isn't making it easy.
"The University of Wolverhampton says it is over-subscribed for its nursing courses by one to four, and those that aren't getting onto the course are opting for other courses such as biomedics.
"What we won't have is 60 people coming out of the university twice a year fully qualified. It will be small numbers."
New Cross is under added pressure at the moment as more and more accident and emergency patients flood in from Staffordshire.
At the moment, patients who would have gone to A&E at Stafford are being brought to Wolverhampton instead.
