HBI Deals+Insights / News

Nurse migration in UK, Germany, Spain, France and Italy 2011-2021

We reported last week on the UK’s deal with Nepal to hire nurses so in this week’s infographic, we thought we would take a closer look at the migration patterns of nurses across the major European markets UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. We look at the totals from 2011-2020/1 and the most recent available year to see if there are any significant differences.

Looking at the UK it is unsurprising that there are some large changes when comparing the totals to 2021. In 2011-2021 we see lots of European countries populating the top ten but when looking at 2021 they have been replaced, which is of course due to Brexit. The Philippines and India have swapped places and in the total account for around half of the 87,575 nurses, which changes to represent nearly three quarters in 2021.

Germany has a different pattern and in its total has its largest proportion, a quarter, from many different countries all sitting outside of the top ten, closely followed by Romania. This is followed by Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Philippines and Serbia. Yet in 2020 this changes and although others is still the largest it is followed by the Philippines, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Romania lags behind. In total 36,774 nurses migrated to Germany between 2011-2020.

Similar to Germany, Spain also has its largest proportion from “Other”, the other proportions are from Portugal, Peru, Columbia, Cuba, Italy and Romania. We can presume some of the migratory routes are due to similarities in languages. This does change again in 2021 though the yearly amounts are so small it’s unlikely that we could read too much into it. Only 3,315 nurses migrated to Spain from 2011-2021 the least out of the countries we looked at.

Only 5,171 nurses migrated to France between 2011-2020 and the majority, over half, were from Belgium. This was followed by the other category with over a quarter and Portugal and Spain made up the rest. In 2020 again just over half were from Belgium and the remainder from other.

Lastly was Italy with 8,763 migrant nurses from 2011- 2021. Romania represented the largest population of migrant nurses, of similar numbers to Germany, this was followed by India and then Other. In 2021 Romania still accounted for over half of migrant nurses, but this was followed by other.

We would welcome your thoughts on this story. Email your views to Kirsty Withams or call 0207 183 3779.