Migration patterns of nurses and midwives
Categories: Blogs, ADR UK Research Fellows, ADR England, ADR Scotland, Office for National Statistics, Health & wellbeing, World of work
10 December 2024
In this blog, ADR UK Research Fellow, Professor Iain Atherton describes how his new research project on the patterns in nursing and midwifery migration feels like he is going full circle in life.
Picture a school of nursing and midwifery. Every year, students graduate and take up employment in their local hospitals or communities. This annual graduation ensures local health services have a steady supply of the professionals so key to providing care.
Except reality is so much more complicated. Nurses, nursing associates, and midwives do not live in the same place all their lives. They move house, sometimes to places very distant from where they studied, for example for work or family reasons. The very process of graduating might lead to moving to find a job. Posts are not necessarily going to be local. In fact, a Scottish health board recently informed new graduates that they would have no jobs available in the near future. For those recently qualified nurses migration is going to be a very real option if they wish to achieve their initial employment within the health service.
From Scotland to the South of England
This accords with my own experience. I moved from Inverness, my hometown, to train as a general nurse at the Fife College of Nursing & Midwifery in the late 1980s. On qualifying though there were few jobs to be had in Scotland. Many of my fellow students looked outside of the health service, I think never to return. Some six months later, I found a position in a community hospital in Wallingford in Oxfordshire. There and eventually elsewhere in the South of England, I worked with many other Scots who had likewise taken the option of following the road south. So, if my experience is anything to go by, migration has been a notable part of nursing workforce sustainability for many years.
From my own perspective, my career benefited from the resulting experience. The same will undoubtedly be so for others. Moving to other parts of the UK (and for a short time to Romania) gave me greater choice of specialities in which to work. Opportunities that could not have been achieved had I stayed in the same place. So for me there have been benefits to migration.
Policy benefits to geographic mobility
There are also potential policy benefits. Geographic mobility gives greater flexibility. Health boards can draw on nurses from areas other than their own locality to fill vacancies. Predicting how many professionals will be needed three years from now to determine student numbers is inevitably a haphazard endeavour. To be able to draw on a wider pool is surely to be valued.
The island of Ireland provides an exemplar. The Government of Ireland is this year funding 96 places for nurses to train in Northern Ireland. Their reasoning is motivated with clear benefits they see as resulting south of the border. It is recognition that many who train in Northern Ireland take up employment in the Republic of Ireland. Were these places not funded then the impact would eventually be felt within their own jurisdiction.
Might there be similar initiatives in the UK? Increased funding might be focussed on areas from which a high number of nurses move. An increase in training places of 65-80% for nurses is envisaged by the NHS workforce plan. That’s a big increase. It isn’t the solution to all workforce woes, but understanding geographic mobility can contribute to solutions and a more geographically informed planning process.
Picture on right: Me in younger days working as a staff nurse in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, having moved south to find a role as a staff nurse.
New dataset holds key
My fellowship will take forward a study of migration within the UK using the recently developed Nursing and Midwifery Council Register linked to Census 2021 – England and Wales dataset. This links together the professional register held by the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) with the 2021 census for England and Wales. Both include data indicating the area where people lived and where they have previously resided. Hence, a basis for migration analysis. While the census is specifically England and Wales, the NMC data is UK wide. It can thus be used to analyse the level of migration between the UK’s constituent countries.
The fellowship will also enable me to develop a community of people interested in the potential of nationally representative data to help us learn about our professions. It will also enable me to further develop my own knowledge and skills of using data, and of enabling findings to have greater impact. To that end, I am delighted to have opportunity to work with valued colleagues from Universities of Bristol and Exeter, and from the Nuffield Trust.
Going full circle
I am very excited to have the opportunity of this fellowship. It feels like the culmination of my career. It brings full circle my experiences as a young, recently qualified nurse with all the challenges to finding jobs, to my academic career today. More than that though, I am excited to take forward work that has potential to benefit these key professions, and by extension patient care.
You can read more about Iain’s research on his project page. The dataset Iain is using is also the topic of conversation in episode three of the new ADR UK podcast Connecting Society.
