Almost 50 nurses will travel thousands of miles across the world to help fill vacancies in hospitals in the north-east in the coming months.
And hundreds more are in line to make the 10,394mile trip from Australia to take up roles in Grampian, following a recruitment trip which is being hailed as a huge success by health bosses.
The Press and Journal exclusively revealed in October that NHS Grampian was planning to send a delegation of four senior medics Down Under to address its staff recruitment crisis.
Attending job fairs in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney cost the struggling board well over £20,000 – but the strong response has left it optimistic it will prove value for money.
As well as 49 nurses and midwives, three of whom will go to other health boards, there are another114 at various stages of training, which they need to complete before they can be registered with the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC).
The delegation was made up of Caroline Hiscox, deputy director for nursing and midwifery, Elizabeth Wilson, senior nurse for workforce planning and development, Susan Coull, head of human resources and Jenny Gibb, associate nurse director.
The group also visited three hospitals which had to overcome their own recruitment crises in the past.
Mrs Hilcox said: “This has been a huge success for us in regards to learning how hospitals find and retain staff but what we absolutely have to do is find a return for our investment which we won’t be able to measure until probably a year from now.
“It’s well known that we have a high number of vacancies so we wanted to try every possible option.
“We interviewed more than 170 registered nurses and on top of that there were a number of students who came to speak to us.”
The impetus for the two-week trip was changes in visa conditions which meant uncertainty for many UK emigrant workers who may have considered returning home.
However the board has now revealed that most of the people offered jobs following the recruitment events in Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney and Perth are Australians seeking to move to Scotland.
Ms Gibb said: “There’s very clearly a wanderlust among a lot of Australians who want to come and experience other places.
“Our stand had lots of information about the area and also how internationally hooked up we are.
“Most of them were really only familiar with Edinburgh, being the capital, but when we said we were two and a half hours from there, their eyebrows were raised as they are used to travelling huge distances – in fact many of them had come three to four hours and flown to be at the events.”
The new nurses will start to arrive in local hospitals in March, with NHS Lothian already employing one of the new recruits.
Each one will be offered support to find accommodation and will also be given a “buddy” staff member.
The board is also in talks with the Western Australian Government, which currently has an over-provision of nurses, to bring some of its trainees over to get clinical experience in the north-east.
The visit is being viewed as a pilot for NHS Scotland and could be rolled out across the country in the future.
