{"id":429293,"date":"2025-09-16T16:21:15","date_gmt":"2025-09-16T16:21:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/429293\/"},"modified":"2025-09-16T16:21:15","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T16:21:15","slug":"the-measurable-damage-brexit-caused-the-nhs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/429293\/","title":{"rendered":"The measurable damage Brexit caused the NHS"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Whenever there\u2019s a conversation about Brexit \u2013 be it online, in a pub, between some friends or (very rarely) in the mainstream media \u2013 I feel like things become strangely nebulous. Esoteric, almost.<\/strong><\/p>\n

People make grand pronouncements about GDP percentages, trade coefficients, migration impact and, from time to time, a bit of a chat about whether the herring off our coast are now, in fact, happier.<\/p>\n

And it frustrates the living hell out of me.<\/p>\n

From political slogans to hospital corridors<\/strong><\/p>\n

For the past several years, I\u2019ve worked for the NHS. I\u2019ve been part of daily meetings (08:30 every damned morning) where we talk about staffing gaps, patients waiting \u2013 we go beyond statistics and discuss what we can and can\u2019t do anymore. I listen to my team talk about whether we\u2019ll be able to send someone on a visit on Tuesday, or whether it is safe for an urgent patient to wait until Thursday (if at all). I\u2019ve listened in on calls where we discuss the fact that we just about have safe staffing levels for the day in A&E \u2013 not because of poor management, despite what the Daily Mail might want you to believe \u2013 but the workforce we once relied on has\u2026 left.<\/p>\n

These things happen while the political class continues the exact same conversations \u2013 sovereignty, tariffs, migration, \u201ctaking back control\u201d \u2013 and they\u2019re resulting in patients falling through the cracks, and sometimes die, because of measurable, Brexit-driven consequences.<\/p>\n

And I\u2019m sick to the damned back teeth of it.<\/p>\n

The collapse of the EU workforce<\/strong><\/p>\n

Our workforce, as a direct result of Brexit, has been all but decimated \u2013 and it\u2019s been happening for years. Right at the time that the Brexit vote first went through, new registrations of EU nurses in the UK collapsed. Spectacularly. Between 2016 and 2018, EU nurse registrations collapsed by 87%, going from\u00a06,400 a year to just 800<\/a> \u2013 which isn\u2019t all that surprising when you consider just how poorly European migrants were painted by the Leave campaign.<\/p>\n

By 2021 we reached the point where not only had new registrations of EU nurses had collapsed, but we were also looking at a mass exodus of this group, with a net decrease from 38,992 EU nurses to 30,311<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now, I will acknowledge that the government has increased these nurses with Non-EU recruitment, with international recruitment up by 46% since 2016<\/a> \u2013 much to the eternal consternation of those who pushed for Brexit to begin with, but this comes with its own issues, because unfortunately, it isn\u2019t just about numbers, but skill mix as well.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to fill a rota with warm bodies, but when you\u2019ve swapped ten experienced EU nurses for ten newly qualified staff still in the earlier stage of their careers, your care quality will take a hit. And unfortunately, it has done so. Hard.<\/p>\n

A study published earlier this year found that there were an approximate additional 1,485 deaths per year<\/a> associated with Brexit workforce shocks since 2016. To put that into a bit of horrifying perspective, that averages out to around 34 extra deaths per affected hospital per year. That is an intolerable number. Imagine being told that your local district general hospital now has the equivalent of a coach crash\u2019s worth of extra deaths every year?<\/p>\n

Not because of new diseases. Not because of funding cuts. But because the nurses who used to keep people alive went home to Spain, Poland or Portugal because people wanted more \u201csovereignty\u201d.<\/p>\n

The social care collapse dragging the NHS down<\/strong><\/p>\n

And when it comes to the subject of social care, the picture becomes even more grim. Once upon a time, EU workers made up around 5\u20137% of the social care workforce, but by 2022 that had dropped to less than 1%. To add to this change, the introduction of new visa restrictions in 2024 meant that overall health and care worker applications fell by 83%<\/a> almost overnight, all because people who \u201cdid not get the Brexit they voted for\u201d were terribly worked up by the fact that non-EU migration had skyrocketed (predictably) after we cut off a major source of the labour workforce.<\/p>\n

The result of all of this? A sector with a vacancy rate of 8.3% when compared<\/a> with the 6.9% vacancy rate in the NHS and 2.8% in the wider economy.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s been created here isn\u2019t a staffing gap so much a staffing chasm.<\/p>\n

Predictably, when social care collapses, it bodily drags the NHS right down with it. When patients can\u2019t be discharged safely, hospital beds become blocked. This in turn means patients can\u2019t be admitted, meaning that A&E becomes a holding pen for people who should not be there, and this creates a whole new level of risk, with boarded patients facing much worse outcomes<\/a> than ones admitted promptly onto wards.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also the matter of families having to pick up far more of the care than ever before to look after relatives, with support for this safety net being beyond non-existent<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And yes, I\u2019ve written recently about the fact that we have a rapidly ageing population, and that is in and of itself a major crisis waiting in the wings, but what Brexit\u2019s wholesale erosion of our health and care workforce has done is kick away one of the few props that kept the system vaguely, sort of, kind of upright.<\/p>\n

A slow-motion medicines crisis<\/strong><\/p>\n

Beyond just the staffing impact, medicines are another slow-burning disaster of a minefield. Since 2010, the UK has had the lowest import growth of medicines<\/a> of any G7 country, while post-Brexit, \u201csupply notifications\u201d, a terribly mundane and very polite term for \u201cwe cannot get this drug for love nor money\u201d has risen dramatically<\/a>, while pharmacists now regularly claim price concessions<\/a>1<\/a> ten times higher than before we made the decision to leave the European Union.<\/p>\n

In actual human impact terms, what this translates to is that if you\u2019re on long-term medication for diabetes, hypertension or depression, there\u2019s a more than decent chance that you\u2019ve been told at least once or twice in the last couple of years that \u201csorry, we can\u2019t get your usual medications, we\u2019ll try and give you something else instead\u201d. Fine for some people, yes \u2013 it may just be an inconvenience, but for other groups, especially with multiple co-morbidities reliant on complex regimes, it\u2019s destabilising, frightening and occasionally dangerous.<\/p>\n

Recruiting from countries in crisis<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the most ethically troubling parts of this all is also exactly where we\u2019re getting our healthcare staff from.<\/p>\n

Anyone who has read anything I\u2019ve written before knows that my view on migration is that it\u2019s a necessity for where we find ourselves at the moment, but even with that said, I\u2019m deeply troubled the fact that we are recruiting healthcare staff from places that simply cannot afford to lose them.<\/p>\n

As of late 2024, nearly 9% of all NHS doctors<\/a> had been recruited from World Health Organization \u201cRed List\u201d countries<\/a> \u2013 countries that the WHO specifically says we should not be recruiting from because their own health systems are in deep crisis.<\/p>\n

This is not a sustainable, moral or ethical recruitment method. We\u2019ve effectively swapped the Polish Nurse working in a Kent A&E for a Ghanaian nurse whose absence now leaves a clinic in Accra dangerously understaffed. It\u2019s a game of robbing Peter to pay Paul on a global scale, except Paul is in a country with a functioning healthcare system while Peter is in one without anything.<\/p>\n

Deepening postcode inequalities<\/strong><\/p>\n

We also have to take into consideration the geography of this impact \u2013 because when you look too deeply into aggregates, you can miss the specific impacts that can be far worse.<\/p>\n

If you live in London, chances are you may not have noticed the same degree of collapse we\u2019ve seen in the health service because international recruitment, as a rule, flows into big teaching hospitals. London trusts can offer far higher pay, better career progression and a global city lifestyle.<\/p>\n

What we see happening then is a two-tier system being slowly created. London, Manchester and Birmingham are muddling through, sustained by international recruitment and higher overall funding, while coastal and rural areas sink ever further, inexorably into crisis, offering patchier services with fewer beds, fewer GPs and fewer secondary care specialists. It\u2019s postcode lottery 2.0 now with added flavours of Brexit!<\/p>\n

And the problem is that once a service degrades in an area, it takes a monumental effort to get it back on its feet \u2013 if it ever does. Lower service provision becomes the norm. Local A&Es are closed<\/a> or downgraded<\/a>. Residential homes start offering \u201cbasic\u201d care instead of much needed dementia services. The inequality that was already baked into the system has now been turbo-charged by Brexit.<\/p>\n

Winter pressures, all year round<\/strong><\/p>\n

These things keep me awake at night. Working for the NHS, the pressure does not ease. Ever. If anything, it\u2019s just intensified. When I started out managing NHS services there was at least the whiff of a hope that \u201cwinter pressures\u201d would give way in the warmer months, giving us all an opportunity to regroup. Now? Winter is all year round. Acute trusts are almost constantly in OPEL2<\/a> 3 or 4 \u2013 the highest levels of operational pressure \u2013 which basically means that terms like \u201cserious concern\u201d are no longer exceptional events, they\u2019re just the baseline we function at. That has a massive psychological effect, because staff don\u2019t even feel like they\u2019re firefighting anymore \u2013 they\u2019re just living in the fire now.<\/p>\n

The financial backdrop? Grim doesn\u2019t even begin to describe it. Every year, we deliver more with less. Every year CIP3<\/a> targets get more steep. Savings become less plausible. It\u2019s reached the point where I get home, three days out of five, and ask myself:<\/p>\n

\u201cAm I actually improving services? Or am I just managing decline and risk mitigating for the very worst? Am I doing anything more than shuffling resources around while patients \u2013 real people, hundreds of thousands of them across my patch and staff, dedicated, loyal desperately tired staff \u2013 bear the brunt of it all?<\/p>\n

These are questions that gnaw at me. It means sleepless nights, staring up at the ceiling wondering if \u201cholding the line\u201d is just really another way of describing an excruciating, slow motion collapse. It means conversations with colleagues where gallows humour is literally the only way to cope. (\u201cWell, at least once the system completely collapses in on itself, we\u2019ll finally get some sleep\u201d, someone on a call said to me recently, and we laughed and immediately went quiet because it wasn\u2019t really all that funny at all).<\/p>\n

A broken promise with human costs<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is the reality of Brexit for the health service. It took a system that had already stretched to near breaking point after years of austerity and stripped out one of the few stabilisers that it had left. The resilience is all but gone. The buffers have disappeared. Every new shock \u2013 a bad flu season, Covid, industrial action or even just a bad week of A&E attendances \u2013 now lands harder and harsher because there is just no give left whatsoever in the system. It leaves people like me feeling like we\u2019re running on fumes pretty much constantly, desperately trying to keep an ever increasingly rickety show on the road with some medical tape, spreadsheets and rapidly diminishing hope.<\/p>\n

This is diametrically opposed to what we were promised by the Leave Campaign. They promised that Brexit would be the biggest fix ever seen, \u00a3350m a week extra, no more waiting, your nan would sit smiling in the A&E waiting room and we would have more beds than we\u2019d be able to figure out what to do with. Absolutely none of this happened. Not a single damned thing.<\/p>\n

And yet, I know that when I next hear a conversation about Brexit, it\u2019ll be about GDP percentages and fish. Honestly, I\u2019m at the point if I hear one more person explain at me that the real win was \u201csovereignty over our waters\u201d, I will assume the foetal position and just start screaming. Sovereignty over our waters does not matter if patients are being boarded in hospital corridors because there are no nurses to care for them. Happy herring do not comfort the families of 1,485 people a year who might still have been alive had EU staff not left their wards.<\/p>\n

Brexit\u2019s real-world wreckage<\/strong><\/p>\n

Brexit was not an abstract shift. It was not esoteric. It was not a vague change. It has translated into measurable harm, counted in vacancies, waiting times, drug shortages, and most painfully, avoidable deaths. The cost is not only trade coefficients, but human beings who have suffered and sometimes died earlier than they should have, and until we have our politicians and leaders speak honestly about this, all the talk about it, \u201cgetting Brexit done\u201d will remain the most expensive and damaging political catchphrase in living memory.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

More<\/a> from East Anglia Bylines<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Subscribe to our newsletters<\/p>\n

Each of our Bylines sends a newsletter every month and we also send out a \u2018Best of Bylines, featuring a selection of the best articles from across the network<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Whenever there\u2019s a conversation about Brexit \u2013 be it online, in a pub, between some friends or (very…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":429294,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[802,748,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-429293","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-brexit","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-european","13":"tag-european-union","14":"tag-great-britain","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115214895766067537","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=429293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/429294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=429293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=429293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=429293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}