More Spanish nurses are Huddersfield bound after hospital chiefs’ latest trip overseas in the hunt for staff.

In June hospital chiefs from Calderdale and Huddersfield Foundation NHS Trust said they would spend £1.5m to fill about 70 vacancies amid some wards suffering understaffing on 50% of their shifts.

But after struggling to find many new staff from the UK, hospital bosses decided to look overseas.

An initial visit to Madrid in November secured only five new staff but a second visit earlier this month has now netted a further 17 Spanish nurses.

And the Examiner can reveal plans to search for nurses in more foreign countries are being considered.

Countries being targeted for 2015 include Romania, Italy, India and the Philippines.

Director of nursing Julie Dawes said: “Many trusts are recruiting overseas at the current time and we were delighted to recruit five nurses on our first visit.

“We also recruited 17 more nurses during a second visit.

“We continue to recruit locally at an open day at either Huddersfield Royal Infirmary or Calderdale Royal Hospital every month and in the last month recruited 19 more nurses from the local area.”

The hospitals’ hunt for nurses is mirrored across the country with recent reports indicating a chronic shortage of homegrown nurses.

Health service data has revealed that four out of five new nurses in hospitals have come from abroad as overseas recruitment quadruples amid new minimum staffing requirements imposed by the NHS.

Nurse to patient ratios are now published on each ward and on the NHS Choices website as part of a bid to reassure the public following the ‘excessive’ deaths scandal at Mid Staffordshire Hospital.

New analysis of 140 English acute hospital trusts’ nurse recruitment shows that in the year to September, 103 of them hired a combined total of 5,778 nurses from abroad – a big increase on the 1,360 nurses employed from outside the UK by the 40 of 105 trusts that provided figures in 2012-13.

Fourteen of the 103 trusts each recruited more than 100 nurses from abroad in 2013-14 with one, King’s College Hospital foundation trust in London, hiring 276 in all.

Spain, Portugal and the Philippines were the countries trusts hired most nurses from – they provided more than 3,700 (64%) between them.

The need for foreign nurses has been criticised by Dr Peter Carter, the chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing.

Dr Carter blamed cuts in training places for the shortfall in British staff to fill the acute hospital posts.

Speaking in a radio interview, he said: “There’s nothing wrong with people from overseas; the health service has done well over the years from the West Indies, Mauritius, Malaysia and so on.

“But there’s something wrong with a system that has such lamentable workforce planning that we have now got a crisis and you have got people recruiting from all points of the compass.

“Someone really has to take responsibility for this.”

Dr Carter said it would be “totally unacceptable” for hospitals to employ foreign nurses if they were unable to speak English fluently.

“It’s no good taking on people who can’t speak the language,” he said. “This was wholly avoidable and we are now playing catch-up.

“You do need to be able to communicate with people, and people should not be employing people that can’t do the job properly.”

For more information about nursing at Calderdale and Huddersfield contact Vicki Drummond on Vicki.drummond@cht.nhs.uk