Over 70 nurses from Philippines offered jobs at Shropshire hospitals
More than 70 nurses from the Philippines have been offered jobs at Shropshire hospitals in the latest round of recruitment.
Officials from Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust visited the Philippines last month to make a further 76 job offers.
This follows more than 60 nurses from the Philippines who are in the process of being recruited, after last year accepting conditional offers to work at the hospitals in Shrewsbury and Telford.
A total of 23 of those nurses have arrived at the trust and are currently completing their exams.
Victoria Maher, workforce director at the hospital trust, said: "The trust continues to develop the registration of our Philippine recruitment.
"A total of 23 Filipino nurses have arrived in the trust and we are now supporting them to complete their objective structured clinical examination tests and obtain Nursing Midwifery Council registration.
"A comprehensive programme of support is in place and to date seven nurses have completed their tests and attained their registration, three have to re-sit part of the test, one will need to retake all elements and nine nurses are currently preparing for their practical examination on May 17.
"There are a further 22 nurses still in the process in the Philippines and we anticipate them to arrive during April and May.
"A second visit took place recently resulting in 76 conditional offers being made, the first of whom will begin to arrive towards the end of the year.
"Our twice-monthly recruitment events for nursing staff have also been very successful, with an average of 17 appointments made at each event so far."
In December the first group of nurses started work at Princess Royal Hospital in Telford.
They followed nine other new recruits who joined the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital in October and November.
It took more than a year to get the new nurses from the Philippines to take up their posts due to immigration difficulties.
Nursing was temporarily placed on the list in December to allow more nurses to be recruited from overseas to meet the perceived shortage.
The latest report from the Migration Advisory Committee has "reluctantly" recommended that nurses from outside Europe should be made a priority for up to 5,000 visas to work in the UK each year, for the next three years.
In England 11,000 nurses from outside the European Economic Area are set to be recruited over the next four years, and the figure rises to 14,000 when the rest of the UK is factored in, the report said.
