Epsom and St Helier hospitals heading to Portugal and eastern Europe to plug huge nursing black hole

Daniel Elkeles - the trust's new chief executive who was appointed last October - told a meeting of Epsom Council’s health liaison panel last month that recruiting nurses was "a really big issue" and said the shortage equated to 10 per of the hospitals’ nursing workforce.

He said there had also been more than 100 vacancies for healthcare assistants - although the majority of these had now been filled.

The chief executive said it had been hard to recruit locally due to a labour shortage and the cost of living in the South East, coupled with a "massive" increase in demand.

He said: "We do have 200 more people working at Epsom and St Helier compared to 18 months ago."

But added: "Nursing recruitment is a really big issue."

Mr Elkeles said the 29 nurses who were recruited from Portugal last year had "settled in really well" and "we’ve all got to be a bit wiser" when it came to recruiting nurses internationally.

"We are going back to Portugal in the spring and we are also going to look at eastern Europe."

He said bank staff, a pool of the hospitals’ own staff members who chose to do more hours for which they are paid extra, were being used to fill the gap.

He said that the trust recently introduced a price-matching policy to attract back staff doing extra hours at hospitals such as St George’s in Tooting which had offered more money.

"We noticed some of the other trusts have increased the rate of pay for bank staff and a couple of weeks ago we introduced a John Lewis ‘never knowingly undersold’ policy," he said.

"As a price of hire the pay would match it.

"We have safely staffed all of the escalation capacity that we have had to open.

"We have to now report every nursing shift where we don’t have the right numbers of nurses.

"It’s very rarely when we don’t achieve safe nursing levels."

He said nurses recruited from abroad were happy to settle in the UK: "There seems to be a much lower drop-off rate."