Healthcare Recruitment in The UK
Healthcare recruitment in the UK isn’t a growth industry but it is growing more than many other sectors of the economy. As the average age of the UK population continues trend upward healthcare services becomes increasingly important. Thus effective healthcare personnel recruitment also becomes more important.
Unlike many other professions where prospective employers are capable of and prefer to do their own recruiting, the healthcare industry has always been somewhat different. Because healthcare jobs are often very technical in nature and employee credentials are so important, healthcare recruitment agencies, companies and services occupy a key role in finding personnel to fill job opening within the industry.
Healthcare recruitment has become so difficult in the UK, Europe and Australia that some companies in Westerm Australia offer $1000 (Aus) incentives just to get a doctor to interview. Healthcare professionals in virtually any specialty can stick a pin in the map of Australia and go anywhere they want.
In the UK and Europe they’re advertising for doctors, nurses and other types of healthcare professionals not only throughout the UK itself but also in Western Europe. Healthcare recruitment agents have very little problem placing qualified candidates. If healthcare recruitment agencies have any problems at all, it’s that there aren’t enough qualified candidates to go around.
The other problem faced by healthcare recruitment agencies, services and firms in the UK, Canada and Australia is that the governments have stopped the easy immigration of new graduated, inexperienced nurses from the Philippines (previously the biggest single source of new nurse personnel).
In the UK, there are a few medical specialties that are open to immigration from far abroad. They do occasionally take qualified candidates from Philippines and some African nations. But it’s becoming harder and harder for them to get visas. When the healthcare recruitment agencies find a good candidate, they do everything they can to expedite the immigration process.
Although the shortage of nurses and other healthcare staff is acute in the UK, Australia and Canada, the number of migrated nurses and healthcare workers they do get from developing countries creates a problem of it own. These developing countries also have a dire need for qualified nurses and medical personnel yet their ability to train and graduate them is much less adequate to the task than in developed countries.
Those nurses who do manage to come a local nurses program of some kind can, very often, make two, three or more times their income simply by migrating to one of the developed, Western countries that will accept them. While it’s true that these new, migrant, nurses often have to cover certain costs related to bringing their skills up to ‘local standards’, they’re still willing to do it because there’s so much to gain on their net income scale.
Outsourcing for these nurses and other healthcare staff is getting more difficult because of local ‘job protection’ issues but also because their won governments are increasingly reluctant to let them leave the country and take their valuable skills with them.
No doubt about it, nursing and just about any healthcare profession you can name is in big demand pretty much anywhere in the world today. Healthcare recruitment agencies, companies and firms who can make sense of the mess it’s in still stand to make a pretty penny by doing so.