The Home Office announced several changes to immigration rules last week including the easing of visa restrictions for doctors and nurses.

The move will mean there will be no restriction on the numbers of doctors and nurses who can be employed through the Tier 2 visa route, allowing the recruitment of more international doctors and nurses.

The easing of the visa rules comes as NHS Trusts reportedly spent at least £1.46 billion on temporary nursing staff a year.

Michael Johnson-Ellis, Managing Director at Healthier Recruitment, commented, “As an organisation which is on the front line of recruitment into the NHS, we understand the challenges that many Trusts are facing to recruit the skills they need to give patients the service they deserve and maintain patient safety. Not only for roles in niche sectors such clinical radiology, emergency medicine and radiography, but also in terms of general nurses.”

Johnson-Ellis also commented on the role of agency staff, “While there is, of course, a place for agency staff, for too long all gaps have been habitually filled by temporary workers to the detriment of continuity of care. And, with the Nursing and Midwifery Council register recording a significant fall in the number of EU nurses since the referendum, something most definitely had to give.”

Philip Braham, co-founder of Remedium Partners, a consultancy which specialises in the recruitment of overseas permanent doctors, commented, “"We are also hopeful that this decision will go a long way towards removing the NHS’s reliance on expensive agency locum doctors as a short-term solution to staffing gaps.”

“Given that a single locum can cost as much as £100,000 in agency fees alone, the NHS not only stands to save significant amounts of money long term, but it will be better placed to provide patients with continuity of care due to a much larger pool of permanent doctors,” Braham said.

Recruitment & Employment Confederation’s head of policy, Sophie Wingfield also commented, “Finally the government is starting to demonstrate some common sense when it comes to immigration. The NHS is reliant on staff from overseas to keep the lights on in hospitals around the country and setting an arbitrary cap on trusts’ ability to access the workers they need was ludicrous.”

Samantha Hurley, Director of Operations, Association of Professional Staffing Companies (APSCo), also commented, “This move should also help to marginally ease talent shortages elsewhere, with visas currently issued to doctors, nurses and other health professionals each year becoming available to other sectors. However, it is our view that immigration policy may have to be reviewed more widely if we are to retain access to the volume of skilled professionals the UK economy needs after we leave the EU.”

In addition to excluding doctors and nurses from the cap on skilled worker visas, the Home Office announced that businesses and employers will be able to recruit an extra 8,000 skilled migrants a year from other professions including IT, engineers and teachers.

“Our data and feedback from recruiters show the UK has a shortage of candidates in a whole range of industries. This move will be extremely welcome to employers in sectors like engineering and IT as it will increase their ability to secure top talent from abroad,” Wingfield said.

The Tier 2 visa route, which has had an annual cap of 20,700 since 2011, has in recent months seen the number of applications exceed the monthly allocation of available places. This has been driven, in large part, by demand from the NHS, which accounts for around 40% of all Tier 2 places.