Portuguese Nurses and Health Technicians in the UK

Abstract

This work will focus on the Portuguese Nurses and Health Technicians in the UK, why they go there and why the UK is open to these professionals. We decided to choose this topic because it is a very current problem and, in Portugal, it is causing a shortage of nurses in our national health. To the later point, our methodology was to divide the main topic into smaller questions and go from there. We focused mainly on the different higher education systems, if there was something in the way nurses were taught that made them more attractive, backgrounds of UK and Portugal, to see why there was a need for and an opening for Portuguese healthcare professionals in the UK and why Portuguese wanted to go there. We also considered Brexit because it is something that without a doubt will change the workforce landscape in this area (as in many others). To support our answers to these problems we relied on websites and news articles from both countries as well as government and international institutions, like Observatório das Migrações and the OCDE. What we can conclude from our research is that indeed there is, on the UK side, a need and willingness to receive Portuguese health care professionals, because they are better trained then their British counterparts, due to a more demanding educational system and requirements to be a nurse in Portugal, which gives them more skills to perform nursing duties, be it in a nursing home or in an hospital. On the Portuguese side there is a need to emigrate because of low wages, and so coupled with the higher employment rates in the UK and the chance to be better payed and rise quicker in the salary ladder, this makes immigrating to the UK very appealing to Portuguese nurses. In regards to the Brexit what was found was that the future of these professionals is very uncertain, and only the future months will tell, what will happen to them and their jobs.