Foreign doctors and nurses are increasingly turning away from the National Health Service (NHS) because anti-migrant rhetoric and rising racism have created a “hostile environment,” the leader of Britain’s medics has warned.

In an interview with the Guardian, Jeanette Dickson, chair of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, said overseas health professionals now see the UK as an “unwelcoming, racist” country, putting the future of the NHS at risk.

She said the health service “could quite easily fall over” without foreign-born staff and warned that it could soon lack “a critical mass of people there to run the service safely.”

Her comments come as new workforce data reveal record numbers of foreign-born doctors leaving the NHS, a halt in post-Brexit recruitment from abroad, and a sharp drop in the number of nurses and midwives joining the service.

According to the General Medical Council, 42% of doctors working in the UK qualified overseas, highlighting the NHS’s growing dependence on international staff.

Dickson said doctors and nurses are being put off by hostile political rhetoric on immigration, media coverage, racist abuse by colleagues, and patient aggression.

“My feeling is we are creating a culture where the rhetoric is ‘foreigner bad,’” she told the Guardian. “Why would you go somewhere where people are going, ‘we don’t need you, we don’t want you’? For them that makes Britain appear unwelcoming, racist.”

She added that some foreign-born NHS staff now feel unsafe in their daily lives.

Selina Douglas, chief executive of the Whittington Health NHS Trust in London, said staff are facing increasing racism.

Referring to long-serving overseas nurses, she said: “Those staff are being racially abused in our hospital. I have had staff spat at (while) walking up the hill (from the tube station).”

Health Secretary Wes Streeting has warned patients that “your right to access free health care in this country does not come with the freedom to abuse our staff on any grounds.”

Dickson also criticized government plans to prioritize UK medical graduates for specialist training posts, saying this could deter overseas doctors at a time of global shortages.

“If the country is not looking as welcoming, or people don’t feel as safe, and Canada, Australia and New Zealand are opening their doors more, then I find it unsurprising that people are leaving,” she said. (Anadolu Agency, but headline rejigged)

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