12.02.18
Amount of trusts worried about Brexit staffing impact doubles in just a year
There is an increasingly growing concern amongst NHS trusts that Brexit will have a negative impact on the ability to hire staff, the Cavendish Coalition has revealed.
Since the referendum, the coalition, made up of NHS Providers, NHS Employers and the Shelford Group, has been monitoring the views of NHS trusts on how Brexit will affect their ability to hire and retain staff through a quarterly Brexit survey.
The group has conducted four surveys since the referendum result in June 2016 and plans to continue throughout 2018.
The latest results show that of the 80 providers that responded, 41% feel that the impact of Brexit will be negative, compared to just 19% after the vote in 2016.
In addition, the number of trusts with plans to recruit from the EU has dropped, with 35% having an overseas recruitment strategy in 2017, compared to 49% the year before.
However, since the most recent set of data, the UK and the EU have reached an outline agreement on the future of EU citizens rights, published in December 2017.
The agreement means that EU citizens living lawfully in the UK by 29 March 2019 will be able to stay with broadly the same levels of rights and benefits that they currently have – a move welcomed by the coalition.
NHS Providers has said that the next set of results will be “important in determining whether this outline agreement between the UK and the EU has given NHS employers more confidence in the government’s strategy to ensure the availability of staff from the European Union.”
The Cavendish Coalition will publish these results in March 2017.
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