Writing exclusively for Caring Times, Tony Stein, chief executive of Healthcare Management Solutions, says reported government plans to recruit thousands of foreign workers to help care homes stay open during the winter are doomed to fail if they are not supported by further measures.

The media is reporting that Health & Social Care Secretary Steve Barclay is planning for the recruitment of thousands of foreign workers to help care homes stay open through the winter.

He is considering streamlining the hiring process by making it easier for regulators to check foreign qualifications. 

A sticking plaster rather than a long-term solution?

The staffing crisis in health and social care is a consequence of poor workforce planning and low pay. Successive governments have failed to stimulate interest in, and encourage the training of, nurses, and poor pay in social care has made it an unattractive and unaffordable option for many.

This has left us with a national shortage of some 160,000 staff that the government is looking to fill with overseas workers from places such as India, the Philippines and South Africa. There are a number of problems with this strategy which is too little and too late.

Since freedom of movement between the EU and UK ended there is now no ‘easy’ route to recruit overseas workers. All foreign workers are treated equally and employers must have a sponsorship license if they wish to recruit from overseas.

Many health and social care companies already have sponsorship licenses, however, if they don’t the process is tortuously long and it can take up to 18 weeks for the Home Office to process applications.

Secondly, the UK is not the only country in the world that is looking overseas to solve their staffing problem. We are just one option among many and while the UK is attractive for a number of reasons, not least of which is the hugely cosmopolitan culture, inflation and the generally high cost of living is making it increasingly less attractive than many other countries.

The NHS managers that are travelling overseas to recruit will find themselves surrounded by managers of the health services of other countries doing the same.

Finally, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Not only do you need to find suitably qualified people to work in the sector, but they need to have sufficiently good verbal and written language skills to be able to communicate with colleagues and patients. Less than perfect skills adds an element of risk into the system, something particularly important where drugs administration and handover of residents and patients at shift end is concerned.

And there is the cultural aspect of this. When someone is in hospital receiving acute hospital care for a short time it’s manageable, however, if you’re elderly and confused, hard of hearing or simply tuned into local dialects, it can be very isolating, living for the rest of your days if completely surrounded by people who you find it hard to communicate and to share lived experiences with.

This strategy may indeed provide some short-term respite, however, it is doomed to fail without further, more practical, measures.

Routine and elective surgical procedures should be transferred to private hospital providers who can process them much more efficiently than the NHS. Social care providers should be utilised to take care of the elderly and vulnerable who are currently languishing in acute hospital beds, taking up a much needed resource.

An example would be elderly patients recovering from stroke. It is vital that they are given access to physiotherapy as soon as possible in order to minimise the long-term effects of a stroke and this is something that hospitals running at or near capacity cannot provide.

Both of the above actions would free up much needed NHS capacity and assist in dealing with winter pressures and bringing down NHS waiting lists.