Brexit has worsened the NHS's acute shortage of doctors in key areas of care and led to more than 4,000 European doctors choosing not to work in the UK, new research reveals.
The disclosure comes as growing numbers of medics are deciding to quit, disillusioned at their relentlessly busy working lives. Official figures show the NHS in England has vacancies for 10,582 physicians.
Britain has about 4,285 fewer European doctors than it would have had if the rising numbers who were coming before the Brexit vote in 2016 had been maintained since then, according to analysis by the Nuffield Trust health thinktank, which it has shared with the Guardian.
In 2021, 37,035 medics from the European Union (EU) and European Free Trade Area (EFTA) were working in the UK. However, there would have been an estimated 41,320 - or 4,285 more - if the decision to leave the EU had not triggered a "slowdown" in medical recruitment from the EU and the EFTA quartet of Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
That dropoff has left four major specialities with longstanding doctor shortages - anaesthetics, children, psychiatry and heart and lung treatment - failing to keep up with demand that has been heightened by Covid and an ageing population.
Just one example of how the slowdown is affecting day-to-day NHS care is the limit on the amount of surgery that can take place, said a Nuffield Trust researcher, Martha McCarey, the lead author of the analysis. The UK has 394 fewer EU/EFTA anaesthetists than if pre-Brexit numbers had continued, she found.
"The NHS has struggled to recruit vital specialists such as anaesthetists at home, and Brexit looks to be worsening longstanding workforce shortages in some professional groups. Without anaesthetists, many operations cannot happen," she said.
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