Politicians need to encourage more British people to work in the NHS. It's a process. Those working for the NHS represent a tiny percentage of migrants.

The rest of your excuses are not credible. There are too many people coming here, it is that simple. Numbers needs to be reduced significantly, and our borders must be better controlled.

It is not a question of if this has to happen, but how quickly.

Not just here. Judging by the rise of right wing parties in parts of the EU, including France, Germany and Holland. Unless this issue is addressed we could soon see a right wing government in a major EU country. I find it really funny that instead of listening and addressing the issues causing this the left simply talks of banning these parties!!!!

This is how we ended up leaving the EU. They didn't want to listen and simply stated that those wanting to leave were right wing racists!

Politicians need to encourage more British people to work in the NHS. It's a process. Those working for the NHS represent a tiny percentage of migrants.

The rest of your excuses are not credible. There are too many people coming here, it is that simple. Numbers needs to be reduced significantly, and our borders must be better controlled.

It is not a question of if this has to happen, but how quickly.

It's still over 15% of the staff, which is significant by any definition - certainly not an amount that's easily replaced and you could absolutely say the NHS is reliant on them.

A lot of people will obviously emigrate with their partners and family, so if we need 250,000 staff, the number of immigrants is always going to be above that.

We also have a further 100,000 vacancies within the NHS and it's barely functioning as a service currently.

I can understand people's concerns with immigration in principle, but I struggle to see how you make up those type of numbers any other way in practice.

We have an ageing population, the tax burden continues to increase and as a nation we don't have enough kids to sustain it.

There's a huge overlap between people who vehemently argued against public sector pay rises and are strongly anti-immigration - it feels like we want to have our cake and eat it.

Edited by EverybodyDannsNow (29 Feb 2024 12.17pm)

I would start by linking student fees to the NHS. For every year someone works for the NHS I would reduce their student fees debt so eventually they will pay nothing. This is to stop a qualified staff saying thanks for the freebie taxpayer I'm off to the private sector.

I cannot understand why we are penalising people in such a vital sector. I would also review the pension scheme. I think I did a previous post about my GP friend who was being penalised in her NHS pension scheme because she wanted to work on past 60.

I would also tell all agencies that the NHS will not pay the ludicrous fees either they cut them or they will not be used. This might cause some short term pain but in the end they will cave.

Anyway just a couple of suggestions oh and more training places.

Edited by Badger11 (29 Feb 2024 12.26pm)

We're not training new doctors and nurses at the rate we used to, so it won't only be 15% of those 100,000 vacancies that we need immigration to fill.

As I mentioned above, we're also losing something like 150,000 staff a year, so the vacancy rate is going to keep rising until that stops.

The reality is it's a s*** deal to be a health professional in the UK at the moment, and there's no logical reason someone choses it as a profession other than just a want to do a good thing... you train for far longer than average, accrue more debt than nearly other profession, to then earn a crap salary and work monstrous hours in one of the most demanding environments you could imagine.

Until we change that reality, the immigration stuff just feels like shouting at clouds to me.