The Global Pandemic has resulted in a double whammy across the globe, with increased demand for healthcare professionals and reduced availability. Especially impacted were countries with a large proportion of expatriate healthcare professionals. 2021 saw healthcare migration return to pre-covid levels, with twice as many nurses migrating compared to 2020.
Healthcare worldwide has been severely impacted by the global pandemic. Communities have become extremely vulnerable and fragile as they try to cope with increasing shortages of qualified staff.
Regulators have witnessed a serious shortfall of health professionals and are facing increasing challenges in attracting qualified and competent staff while meeting their recruitment targets. In the UK alone, there was already a shortage of around 50,000 nurses before the coronavirus pandemic, and the healthcare system is still nowhere near to bridging that gap.
Countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, Germany and the Czech Republic depend on foreign-born workers in the critical sector of healthcare services. In the United Kingdom and the United States, 29% and 25% of doctors are foreign-trained. The growing demand for medical professionals and the limited pool of available talent continues to challenge the healthcare system of these countries.
Severe nurse shortage is expected to continue and peak within the decade
- One out of six of the world’s nurses are expected to retire in the next ten years, meaning that 4.7 million new nurses will have to be educated and employed just to replace those who retire*.
- There has been a growing demand for international nurses, mainly due to an ageing nursing workforce, reduced domestic supply, insufficient nursing training capacity, focused national policy on international recruitment as a “solution”, better earnings and career prospects from the source country.
In the context of increased demand and constrained supply, there has been a 5% increase in the percentage of fraudulent documents presented. There has been an 11% year-on-year increase in the number of misrepresented employment documents shared for verification purposes, while there has been a decline in the number of misrepresented education credentials.
Overwhelmingly, DataFlow’s clients agree to have a comprehensive set of checks consisting of education, previous employment, certificate of good standing and Digital Footprint Verification to help identify any discrepancies or deficiencies in the licence applications.
For a detailed review of 2021 and our learnings from application submissions during the past year, please click here.
