International Nurses Day and Immigration Reforms

Internationally Qualified Occupational Therapist, Owen Chinembiri argues for the positive aspects of immigration.

Last Monday was International Nurses Day. While I and others were celebrating the contribution of international nurses, the government announced their new immigration ambitions and plans. The response to the plan was exactly as expected. People retreated even further to their original positions, dug their feet in and put plugs in their ears. It then became a shouting contest about the virtues and challenges of immigration. Every expert, journalist, podcaster (and comedian) was pontificating about the political, financial and social impact of immigration.

My interest in this area is driven by my lived experience as an Occupational Therapist who came to the UK 21 years ago and now works as the workforce lead for the NHS Race and Health Observatory. Whenever these discussions take place, the voice of the international worker gets drowned out at best and completely ignored at worst. Immigrants are talked about and rarely given an opportunity to tell their side of the story. Numbers are selectively thrown about by people who appear to have an agenda to swing people in a certain direction.

Here are a couple of numbers to inform and give context to the issue of immigration from an NHS and health care perspective.

Table 1: International clinicians and health care professionals (latest available data)

Sources of data used in calculation: General Medical Council (GMC), Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) and Health Care Professionals Councils (HCPC) websites accessed May 2025.

• According to the GMC register data summary portal, there are 110,732 medical and dental registrants who acquired their qualification outside the UK.
• According to the NMC register data report for 2024, there are 200, 362 nurses and midwives registrants who acquired their qualification outside the UK.
• According to the HCPC registrant snapshot data for March 2025, there are 49, 262 international health care professionals registrants.
• These internationally trained clinicians and health care professionals, provide care to millions of people in the UK. From delivering babies, to surgery to therapy to x-rays and everything in between.
• Using information from the Unit costs of health and social care manual (2024) on the cost of training medical and dental, nurses, therapeutic, and technical staff, the UK has saved the equivalent of more than £59 billion by recruiting people who qualified from outside of the UK.
• Every year, these same clinicians pay almost £2.5 billion in taxes.

In my cohort at university, of the seven people who graduated as Occupational Therapists, six would end up working in the UK. In today’s money, the six of us saved the UK £434, 922 in training costs as per the unit costs of health and social care manual.

This may be the first time you will be coming across these numbers presented in this way. My intention is to offer people the other side of the immigration financial equation that is not often discussed when people talk about the cost of immigration.

It should also be noted that the Immigration Health Surcharge Research Briefing shows that the annual immigration health surcharge of £1, 035 per person raised over £1.7 billion in gross surcharge revenue in 2023/24, and £6.9 billion since it was introduced in 2015. A work visa costs between £303 – £1,751 and an indefinite leave to remain applications costs £3,029 per adult.

Long story short, immigrants pay a lot of additional money to the government that UK citizens do not have to pay.

On top of these charges, data from the NHS Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES) and the medical equivalent of the standard (MWRES) show that internationally trained clinicians have poorer access, outcomes and experiences in the NHS.

To summarise, people in the UK benefit from receiving care from hundreds of thousands of international clinicians and health care professionals whose training was paid for by other countries. These clinicians pay taxes like all other NHS workers. However, they have additional “taxes” they pay which do not apply to their UK colleagues.

The next time you are listening to the news, radio or a podcast and they are talking about immigration, remember these numbers as they may help inform your opinion.