should we start with
"Ah the old chestnut that "we need 10,000 immigrant NHS workers per year to save the NHS from collapsing"?... Have you ever considered that maybe, just maybe, we might not need those 10,000 migrant NHS workers per year if we didn't have high hundreds of thousands of potential new users of the NHS arriving in the country per year?!"
In 2010 the NHS had the highest approval rating from the population in history.
Because the government had increased spending on it year on year for 13 years the most sustained increase in funding since the beginning of the NHS. The Tory government of the early 1970's had slightly higher increases for a considerably shorter period.
Inflation in health care is as lot higher than general inflation due to increase in treatments because of research.
The most obvious way you can see this is the cost of private healthcare in the UK, which is market driven and provides the same level of care year on year and passes the costs on the the consumers. Costs of this have risen annually by 10%
Therefore to keep pace spending increases have to be a lot higher than general inflation.
The figures are all in the office of national statistics reports (about 50 of them, but you can see a digested version here
https://fullfact.org/health/satisfaction-nhs-peaked-2010/)
over the next 15 years (to 2025) the total number of immigrants was 2.2 million. (again ONS figures)
That means there was an increase demand on the NHS of 3.2% due to immigration.
So if we only needed the immigrants workers in the NHS to deal with immigrants we would only see immigrant employment in the NHS at 3.2% and not 21%.
The reason the NHS is struggling is because although the government since 2010 have increased spending by 1 or 2% above general inflation. That does not meet the inflation rate of healthcare. To do that they would have to have increased spending by between 5 and 8% above general inflation.
