Healthcare

Viscount Bridgeman Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Bridgeman]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Hunt for initiating this debate and I declare an interest as a former chairman of an independent hospital.

In the brief time available to me, I want to speak about overseas health professionals, particularly nurses practising in the United Kingdom. I hope that this matter will be covered in greater detail in a debate for which I have my name down and which is working its way up the list. As your Lordships will be aware, nurses coming from within the European Union have the right under the recognition of professional qualifications directive to practise in the United Kingdom subject only to producing evidence of technical competence obtained from their country of origin. The relevant directive specifically prohibits blanket language testing by the Nursing and Midwifery Council as a condition of registration.

The current immigration problems faced by this and previous Governments mean that, inevitably, recruitment of skilled personnel from outwith the European Union is severely restricted. Many hospitals feel the loss of top-quality Australian, New Zealand, South African and Canadian nurses. The supply of home-trained nurses barely meets demand, so inevitably many hospitals and healthcare institutes have to rely on the only other source of nurses—the European Union.

In some member states, particularly those in eastern Europe, there is a shortage of advanced clinical technology and it follows, therefore, a shortage of opportunities for their nurses to be trained in the use of advanced equipment. As for language testing, your Lordships will appreciate that there is a considerable difference between a working level of conversational English and the very much more technical language of, for example, the surgical theatre. There have, unfortunately, been cases of theatre nurses from the EU slipping through the language competency net. I know of one incident of a wrong instrument being handed to a surgeon in the course of an operation as a direct result of a language misunderstanding. I am in no doubt that this is not an isolated incident. I do not know whether the sad case related by the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, owed anything to a language misunderstanding but, on the safety issue, there is a disaster waiting to happen.

The directive is in the course of being revisited. The relevant department in Brussels has been engaged in a consultation exercise with the healthcare professions in the Union, which will, one hopes, determine how the language issue may be addressed. I am reassured that the UK’s Nursing and Midwifery Council was appointed to collate other members’ views. I have had a helpful meeting with the Minister on this matter and am grateful for his answers to my Written Questions, from which I note that the issue of language competence is currently being discussed with the European Commission, the GMC and other organisations. I suggest that for the commissioning body, which is in the early stages of gestation, there is a good alternative in the Nursing and Midwifery Council, which is up and running and perfectly placed to undertake this language supervision.

A resolution to this problem cannot come too soon. Patient safety must not be allowed to be prejudiced by the directive as it stands. I wish the Minister well in his efforts to address this urgent problem.