Thousands of nurses are leaving the NHS in search of better pay and working conditions abroad.

More than 10,000 nurses and midwives left to work abroad in 2006-07, leaving the NHS just a few years from a staffing crisis, the country’s top nurse said.

Nearly 35,000 nurses - enough to staff the entire health service in Wales – have emigrated in the past four years. During the past three years there has been a 75 per cent rise in the number of nurses leaving for Australia alone, data from the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) suggests.

Despite an anticipated shortfall of 14,000 nurses by 2010, Clare Chapman, the Department of Health’s director-general of workforce, has said that the NHS no longer needs to increase overall numbers of nurses and doctors.

Peter Carter, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), told The Times that the Government was guilty of a “yo-yo approach” to workforce planning, exacerbating low morale. “We are just a few short years away from a crisis,” he added. “There is every sign that being short-staffed on overstretched wards puts patients at risk, yet an estimated 20,000 nursing posts have been cut in hospitals and surgeries across the country.

“At the same time as they are offered a miserly pay deal, they are being bombarded with advertising for a better life abroad. When you are offered comparable salaries and a higher quality of life in Australia, the Cayman Islands or South Africa, is it any wonder that some might choose to kickstart their careers abroad?”

The average salary for an NHS nurse was £24,000, Dr Carter said, about £10,000 less than the average police officer or teacher, while a below-inflation pay rise of 0.6 per cent in real terms last year had been an insult. In total, 33,513 nurses left the UK and registered to work abroad between 2003-04 and 2006-07, but this was likely to be a conservative estimate, Dr Carter said. Meanwhile, 6,144 nurses from abroad were registered to work in the UK last year, 4,624 of them from outside the EU.

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