Hospital to recruit nurses from India

Three hospital bosses will go to Asia to interview more than 100 nurses in a bid to fill vacancies.

Interviews will be held in Delhi and Bangalore. The managers are due to leave on the recruiting exercise on November 26.

The new recruits will join Filipino nurses already on the payroll at the Bolton hospital. The first Filipino group arrived in Bolton 12 months ago, with the second arriving six months later -- filling vacancies which have been empty for more than two years.

Now, recruitment and retention manager Aasha Bhatia will travel first to Bangalore and then Delhi

to recruit male and female nurses. It comes at a time when the public service union, Unison, claims that half of all British nurses have seriously considered leaving their jobs because of poor pay. Starting salaries for nurses start at £16,005.

Ms Bhatia will fly out with Bolton hospital managers Mandy Leyland, head of nursing services, and Clare Swarbrick, alongside managers from seven other hospitals, in an official visit organised by the Department of Health.

Nurses are travelling from all over India for the interviews after the British government was swamped with applications following an advert in The Indian Times.

Ms Bhatia, who will be in India for two weeks, said: "We are still committed to filling vacancies locally and, over the past year, we have filled more vacancies with local nurses than foreign ones."

The Royal Bolton Hospital will not say how many new Indian recruits will be joining their staff and says it will be "difficult" to say how much the project will cost the cash-strapped Bolton Hospitals NHS Trust.

Hospital directors are currently deciding how many more nurses they need to improve their services to patients. The Indian nurses are expected to be used in medical and surgery specialist areas.

They will sit exams in English comprehension, literacy and numeracy, as well as going through the security checks made on new staff at the hospital. These will include police checks and tests for diseases such as TB and HIV, which are highly prevalent in India.

Ms Bhatia said: "The procedures and tests that they have to go through are the same for all staff, no matter what country they come from."

Ms Bhatia said: "I don't think the hospital can be criticised for recruiting foreign nurses. I believe we have reached a happy medium."

In October, the hospital's vacancy rate fell from more than 130 to just 25. But hospital chiefs say they are considering increasing the number of nursing jobs to work in busier parts of the hospital.

But getting a nurse from Salford does not quite make the same headlines. But the exercise is expected to be cheaper than hiring an agency to recruit -- a system used three times by Bolton to recruit their Filipino nurses.