Disappointed foreign nurses quit NHS because the North 'is nothing like London'

FOREIGN nurses are quitting the health service after being disappointed that the North is nothing "like London".

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Nurses recruited from abroad by the East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust thought they were moving to the capital.

But now a quarter have quit amid struggles to get foreign health workers to understand the local accent.

Christine Pearson, the trusts' chief nurse, said: "When they came to England they felt they were coming to maybe London, so that was one of the issues we had to work on.”

The trust's two hospitals recruited more than 40 nurses from European countries including Italy, Romania and Portugal.

However, about a quarter of the first 26 new nurses have already left.

Miss Pearson added: "I had a patient say to me 'you're not from round here', so even if you live 25 miles down the road in Manchester such as me, you'll always have language barriers."

In June last year, the trust was forced to give training to foreign nurses who were struggling to understand critical healthcare words like "blood" and "bath" when spoken in a Lancashire accent.

The nurses were taught phrases such as "make us a brew" and the nuances of Northern culture.

Italian nurse Greta Veneruz, 23, who moved to Blackburn, said: “We learnt English like how people speak in London and when we came here it didn’t sound the same.”

Nearly 6,000 nurses were recruited from abroad in the year to September 2014, with most coming from Spain, Portugal, the Phillipines and Italy, according to official figures

The Royal College of Nursing last year slammed the total as "no way to run a health service" as the number of nurses arriving to work here leapt by nearly 50 per cent in just a year.

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