NHS chiefs fly to Canada to find nurses

Hospital chiefs are flying to Canada to recruit nurses because the National Health Service cannot meet demand.

The initiative has exposed a catastrophic drop in the number of nurses being trained in the UK, from 37,000 in 1983 to an estimated 9,000 this year.

Two senior managers from the North Herts NHS Trust are being sent to Canada, where nurses earn up to three times as much, to recruit staff for the Lister Hospital in Stevenage.

Health ministers insist that nursing shortages are confined to isolated places or areas of specialist expertise, but the Opposition claims the Lister experience is "symptomatic of the national shortage of nurses".

Ms Tessa Jowell, shadow health minister, said: "The Government has sat back and allowed this ludicrous situation to develop. They have absolutely no idea about the scale of the crisis in nurse recruitment, as they didn't bother to collect figures on the extent of the shortages.

"Not only is this a shocking waste of taxpayers' money, it shows gross neglect of the skills and aspirations of young people in this country who yearn to become nurses."

Nursing unions accuse the Department of Health of "panic measures" to increase numbers. There will be a 14 per cent increase in this year's training intake and a similar rise next year.

But it takes three years to train nurses, and the Royal College of Nursing claims it will take until beyond 2000 to retrieve the situation.

The North Herts NHS Trust says the hospitals throughout the country - including those in the private sector - are finding it difficult to recruit qualified nurses. Lynne Watson, the Trust's director of human resources, said: "This exercise is part of our strategy to ensure that we have qualified nurses."

According to union sources, staff nurses in Canada earn pounds 18,000 to pounds 23,000 a year, compared with pounds 12,000 to pounds 15,000 in the UK.

Ms Jowell claimed that part of the shortage in Britain was due to the high drop-out rate because of low morale. Private nursing also offered higher wages. "There are just not enough coming through," she said. "There is no long-term planning in the system. It's all very short- term and there has been a cutback of training places."

A new training system in- corporating a nursing diploma in higher education has not frightened off potential nurses, according to NHS sources, but there has been a severe cutback in the number of courses, resulting in fewer students being trained.