Crisis NHS trust urged to recruit locally amid drive for foreign nurses

Northern Lincolnshire and Goole Hospitals NHS Foundations Trust is using recruitment agency Search to help find nurses in Spain and Portugal.

The trust will be interviewing 53 of them next month with the aim of recruiting 30.

Jane Heaton, deputy director of organisational development and workforce, said: “We are delighted with the success so far of recruiting from abroad.

“We have received a lot of applications and will be interviewing 54 people during September. We will be looking at filling 30 posts from these interviews.”

The trust, which runs hospitals in Goole, Grimsby, and Scunthorpe, was placed in “special measures” last month after a litany of failings were uncovered in a Government-ordered review carried out by NHS medical director Sir Bruce Keogh.

Staff retention and recruitment were among the concerns raised in the review.

Sharon Benstead, officer at the Royal College of Nursing, said: “We have raised the shortage of nursing staff with Northern Lincolnshire and Goole Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust on many occasions.

“The RCN has requested that the trust look at recruiting and retaining nurses from the local geographical area and support nurses returning to nursing practice with robust family-friendly policies.

“We do not object to nurses being recruited appropriately from overseas but feel the trust needs to do more to attract and retain local nurses in the longer term.”