Africa · 2020s

Nurses trained in Africa, working in Britain

A sepia photograph of St Thomas's Hospital in London seen across the River Thames: a long row of tall Victorian pavilion blocks with pointed roofs. — St Thomas's Hospital, Lambeth, seen from across the Thames, Victorian photograph, Wellcome Collection, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0. Cropped and shown in black and white.

Many of the nurses joining the UK's nursing register are trained in countries that cannot spare them. The World Health Organization keeps a list of countries with serious shortages of health workers, and the UK's own code says employers should not actively recruit from them. Nigeria and Ghana are both on that list, yet in the year to March 2026 Nigeria was the second-largest source of new international nurses on the UK register.

None of this is illegal. The code bars active recruitment, but individual nurses may still apply, and many do so for better pay and conditions. The cost falls on the countries that trained them, and Ghana has watched its nurses leave in large numbers.

At the same time, UK health aid to the countries on the list has fallen by about 63 per cent, from 2020 to 2023. The country that trained the nurse paid for the training, and the patients who benefit are in Britain.

How it worked

Make people work for nothing

Who gained

The UK's health service, which gains trained nurses without paying for their training.

What it left

Hospitals and clinics in countries already short of nurses, and a fall in the aid that was meant to help them.

Sources