Recruiting nurses trained in other countries is central to the government’s recruitment and retention strategy. In the second article in this month’s Nursing Managementon international recruitment, Paula Hancock and Sue Hopkins explain how the experience need not be negative for new recruits to the NHS

IT SEEMS only yesterday that the government and the nursing profession were talking about ‘black holes’. Not the sort created by the collapse of the stars in far-away galaxies, but about the shortage of 18-year-old school leavers from which to recruit student nurses. In the early 1990s the cry was that there were insufficient jobs for newly qualified nurses and for the first time the topic of unemployed nurses was debated.