Foreign nurses registering in UK despite 20-year work gap

Regulator forced to accept overseas nurses without up-to-date training while similar UK applicants are turned away Nurses and midwives from other EU countries are being registered to work in the UK despite not having worked with patients for 20 years, regulators have told a House of Lords inquiry. The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) is being forced to accept foreign applicants without any recent experience to its register while British nurses without up-to-date training have had to leave the profession. The council’s chief executive, Dickon Weir-Hughes, said it had to operate a two-tier system because of EU rules on the free movement of workers. The revelation came in evidence to a Lords sub-committee investigating the mobility of healthcare professionals between member states. In evidence to the same inquiry the doctors’ regulatory body, the General Medical Council (GMC) revealed that a foreign doctor’s husband contacted them on her behalf to register her for work because she could not speak English. The European commission is reviewing the rules governing mutual recognition of professional qualifications. The government and healthcare bodies have been pressing for changes for two years after the Guardian revealed how a German doctor, Daniel Ubani, who was subsequently ruled incompetent by a coroner and the GMC, accidentally killed a patient on his first UK locum shift by administering a massive overdose of painkillers. The sub-committee has published written and oral evidence as it prepares what is expected to be an extremely critical report on the current arrangements. The NMC has a register of 670,000 professionals, with about 7,000 nurses and midwives from elsewhere in the EU applying each year. Weir-Hughes told peers he was concerned about the “integrity” of the register. The council required British nurses and midwives to undergo a specific number of hours of continuing professional development (CPD) and training every three years, he said. Nurses who did not complete this further training could no longer be registered. However, some EU applicants had not worked as nurses in two decades. “They make no secret of that; they simply have not practised as they have been doing other things,” he told the sub-committee. “Until fairly recently I was refusing those people entry to the register but under EU law that was not acceptable, so our council very reluctantly decided that I had to admit them. “We now have a situation whereby we are admitting people who literally have not been near a patient for 20 years, have done no CPD and have to be admitted to the register because they have freedom of movement and rights. Yet if they were a UK-registered nurse or midwife, they would not be allowed to continue. Indeed, they would have to do a return-to-practice course at a school of nursing or midwifery.” At another hearing, the GMC’s chief executive, Niall Dickson, told how a member of his staff was contacted over an EU doctor’s potential application to join the UK’s medical register. They realised “they were speaking to the doctor’s husband because the doctor could not speak English well enough to have a conversation with someone in a contact centre”, said Dickson. “Our member of staff kept on saying ‘I need to speak to the doctor.’ The husband helpfully said, ‘No, you can’t speak to her because I am busy translating for her.’” Ubani, though struck off in Britain, is still allowed to practise in Germany. In July an administrative medical court in Westfalen-Lippe, Germany, fined him €7,000 (around £6,000) for breaking the country’s code of conduct for doctors. However, a ruling said his performance in the UK “cannot be seen as an expression of his indifference towards his patients”. It added: “It serves rather more to cast doubt on the professional competence of the accused than his personal integrity and his professional ethics.” Nursing Midwifery Doctors Health NHS European Union Europe James Meikle guardian.co.uk

Posted by on September 2, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.