The East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust recruited 40 nurses from abroad during 2014, but out of these a quarter have quit their jobs as they have difficulty in understanding local accent and according to them ‘North West is nothing like London’.
The recruitment were made from Italy, Romania and Portugal and most of them had been taught English as it is spoken in London. In a bid to make them comfortable with the local accent, the nurses were given training in critical healthcare words like “blood” and “bath” when spoken in a Lancashire accent along with general words such as “make us a brew”.
Christine Pearson, the trusts’ chief nurse, said: “When they came to England they felt they were coming to maybe London, so that was one of the issues we had to work on.”
Miss Pearson added: “I had a patient say to me ‘you’re not from round here’, so even if you live 25 miles down the road in Manchester such as me, you’ll always have language barriers”, quotes The Daily Express.
The trust is now reporting that about a quarter of the first 26 new nurses have already left despite bring given training on local accent.
Nearly 6,000 nurses were recruited from abroad in the year to September 2014, with most coming from Spain, Portugal, the Phillipines and Italy, according to official figures
The Royal College of Nursing last year slammed the total as “no way to run a health service” as the number of nurses arriving to work here leapt by nearly 50 per cent in just a year.
