An inquiry finds the NHS needs staff from other countries to be healthy.
A report from Parliament says that hiring health workers from other countries is not a “short-term” fix but a vital part of the NHS’s structure.
The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Health and Security looked into how much the UK depends on health personnel who have been trained abroad.
The paper “An Honest Account of the Benefits and Costs of International Health Worker Recruitment” says that the UK has gained a lot by hiring trained health workers from other countries, but it has to plan its workforce better.
About one in three NHS workers got their training outside of the UK, and in 2025, about one in four nurses on the nursing register did not get their training in the UK. About half of the new nurses who started working in 2023-24 were trained outside of the U.S.
The APPG said that the UK had saved about £14 billion on training costs for NHS doctors and midwives, with £1.1 billion of that coming in the last year.
However, it also warns that bad hiring practices could cost source nations a lot of money, especially those with weak health systems, because they lose skilled health workers and specialists, which makes it harder for them to train new ones.
The research says that the UK should “invest in a strong future” by making long-term co-investment agreements with source nations to train, hire, and keep health personnel.
This would include making sure that the UK gives more money to other nations when it hires more people and putting money into global training and skills paths.
It also tells UK health providers to “integrate, protect, and retain” overseas staff by giving them fair working conditions, good training, and pastoral assistance so they may have stable careers in the NHS.
The Nursing and Midwifery Council says that the number of professionals moving to the UK plummeted by almost a third last year, after years of rise.
The APPG said that the government’s goal of cutting the number of foreign workers in the NHS to about 10% by 2035 was too high. It also said that “the foreseeable future” would require staff from other countries.
The NHS 10-year health strategy, which was announced last summer, aims to reduce the NHS’s reliance on hiring people from other countries by making more medical school spots available and getting rid of training bottlenecks.
Andrew Mitchell, who led the investigation, said, “We need to grow our own workforce.” But it’s no longer believable to say that health workers are only national assets in a globe that is getting smaller.
“If we get help from health workers trained abroad, we also have a responsibility to help make the systems they come from stronger.”