LONDON: In what could be suicidal for Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), hundreds of Indians nurses who have been its backbone, might be packed off to India.

A new immigration policy that intends to cap the number of migrants living in UK will lead to almost 7,000 overseas nurses being sent home by 2020.

Under new rules, up to 3,365 nurses currently working in the UK may have to leave the country from 2017 as a direct result of the 2012 immigration changes.

If levels of recruitment stay the same, by 2020, 6,620 nurses will be impacted, majority of which will be from India according to the Royal College of Nursing (RCN).

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The new rules say that a nurse can stay in the UK only if she or he earns a minimum of £35,000 a year – which is the salary of a senior nurse. This is a position that the majority of nurses would not reach within six years.

What experts find silly is that the NHS has already spent over £20 million recruiting the 3,365 nurses already working in the UK who may have to return home because they are unlikely to meet the income threshold. If recruitment from outside Europe were to continue, by 2020 employers may have invested nearly £180 million on recruiting nurses who may have to leave the UK after six years.

UK’s loss however could be India’s gain.

According to the World Bank, there was a shortage in India of 2.4 million nurses in 2012 and this trend is only likely to worsen.

Dr Peter Carter, Chief Executive of the RCN said “Due to cuts to nurse training places, trusts are being forced into relying on overseas recruitment, as well as temporary staff, just to provide safe staffing. A cap on agency spending will make one of these options more difficult, and these immigration rules will limit the other. The immigration rules for health care workers will cause chaos for the NHS and other care services. At a time when demand is increasing, the UK is perversely making it harder to employ staff from overseas. The NHS has spent millions hiring nurses from overseas in order to provide safe staffing levels. These rules will mean that money has just been thrown down the drain”.

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Dr Carter continued “The UK will be sending away nurses who have contributed to the health service for six years. Losing their skills and knowledge and then having to start the cycle again and recruit to replace them is completely illogical. NHS trusts are being asked to provide safe staffing with both hands tied behind their backs. Without a change to these immigration rules the NHS will continue to pay millions of pounds to temporarily rent nurses from overseas”.

In 2012, the European Commission estimated that there would be of a shortfall of nearly 600,000 nurses in the EU by 2020. With traditional destinations for UK nurse migration such as Australia also predicting a dramatic increase in their own nurse shortfalls, with up to 109,000 nursing vacancies predicted by 2025 (nearly 27% of the current national workforce), those sent back from UK will then go to these countres.

Japan is also considering more aggressive overseas recruitment drives as the country will need to secure an additional 880,000 to 1 million nurses to meet demand.

The last time the UK experienced a significant shortage in registered nurses was in the early 2000s. As a result, the UK’s reliance on internationally recruited nurses peaked with the UK recruiting over 16,000 nurses in 2001-2; the vast majority from outside the European Union.

UK increased student commissions and the reliance on internationally recruited nurses declined throughout the decade.

In 2014-15, a total of 8,183 internationally recruited nurses joined the register to work in the UK; 7,518 from within the EEA and 665 from outside the EEA.