Shropshire Star comment: Let’s grab offers of such help
There’s one word for Telford’s Princess Royal Hospital at the moment – Help!
It needs help and support to steer it through a particularly troubled time in its history, and consequently has been placed in special measures.
And one of the problems it has which is a major factor in its troubles, especially the decision to close the accident and emergency unit overnight, is the difficulty in recruiting skilled staff.
A nursing recruitment firm has now written to the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust saying it can indeed help. The firm represents two EU nursing universities in Poland, and one in Bulgaria, and the idea is to get them plugged in to the trust to establish a stream of nurses into its employment pool.
The nurses under the proposed arrangement would know where they would be going to work early in their training, and the trust would have the benefits of what on the face of it looks like a reliable flow of nurses.
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“This could potentially solve your nursing recruitment problem for the indefinite future,” writes Nick Miller of London-based nursing recruitment firm Hunter Miller in a letter to trust boss Simon Wright.
That is a great offer and the background is that there are a number of ideas being explored.
Brexit or no Brexit, freedom of movement or no freedom of movement, the flow of skilled people from abroad to fill skills shortages in this country has been welcomed for generations.
The links between Britain and Poland in particular run deep, to the dark days of 1939 and 1940, and there is a reminder of that in our pages today where we describe a pilgrimage by a Polish woman to a Wellington house where her grandfather was a frequent guest during the war, after escaping captivity under Nazi occupation and coming to England.
It will fall to the trust to decide whether this firm’s offer is something to be snapped up. As with so many other things that look too good to be true at first sight, there will no doubt be various pros and cons to be balanced against each other.
However, offers of help to those who are struggling should not be spurned lightly. And may they keep on coming.
