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‘Bad Brexit could be a disaster for NHS’
A bad Brexit could be a “disaster” for the local NHS, the area’s top health chief said.
Speaking to a board of elected officials from Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire, Julia Ross laid out how exiting the European Union could affect services in the area.
“The NHS has had quite a lot of direction nationally [on Brexit],” she said.
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“It is being handled nationally. We are, of course, thinking about it locally but we’re very much relying on there being some kind of national solution.
“Clearly Brexit for us – as I think it will be for you [local councils] – in many of our services, in workforce terms, could be a real disaster if we get it wrong. We’re very much conscious of that and we’ve got a session planned very shortly to go into it in more detail.”
Julia Ross, chief executive of the CCG
Ross is chief executive of Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire Clinical Commissioning Group, which oversees NHS services in the area.
She made the comments at a Joint Health Overview and Scrutiny meeting in Kingswood, attended by councillors from the three areas.
One of the politicians, Shirley Holloway, a South Gloucestershire councillor, said she visited Southmead Hospital where they had recently employed a “very large” number of Spanish staff.
“They were particularly concerned about their future,” she said.
Ross said: “I think its a general concern. We’ve got a lot of people who have come from the European Union. All I can say is we don’t actually know how this will end.”
At a meeting held in North Somerset last week, the head of Weston Area Health Trust, which runs Weston General Hospital, said the Brexit vote was already affecting staff numbers.
“Many of our staff are from overseas, that’s international, but we also continue to recruit from Europe,” chief executive Jamers Rimmer said. “That has slowed down as a result of Brexit – and indeed we’ve lost people.
“We couldn’t run the hospital without our European staff, or also without or home-based staff.”
Many other UK health Trusts have raised concerns over a ‘Brexit brain drain’ from the NHS.
Nearly 4,000 nurses and midwives from the European Economic Area left the Nursing and Midwifery Council register between 2017 and 2018 – 28 per cent more than the previous year.
Jack Pitts is a local democracy reporter for Bristol.
Main photo ©Barbara Evripidou2016.
Read more: Is Brexit affecting the NHS workforce in Bristol?
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