Malta faces another mass exodus of foreign nurses as an Irish healthcare recruitment agency seeks to hire hundreds from the island in October.

The recruitment agency Servisource said it has 310 vacancies to fill in Ireland.

Malta’s complement of nurses currently stands at 4,000.

The island has a perennial shortage, with the number leaving the profession never matching those joining. It is estimated that it needs an additional 400 nurses.

Servisource sent an advert about its recruitment drive to people in the industry.

Sources said it was one of many nurse recruitment agencies in the UK and Ireland that have been head-hunting Indian, Pakistani and Filipino nurses working in the Maltese healthcare system as well as those in homes for the elderly. 

The advert for nurses.

Around 15 per cent of nurses working in Malta are third-country nationals, mainly hailing from India and Pakistan.

Contacted by Times of Malta, Servisource healthcare manager Aileen McCann confirmed that the agency was seeking to recruit experienced nurses from Malta to work in Ireland.

“We have been aware of Indian nurses relocating to Malta and gaining invaluable nursing experience while working in your hospitals and, for this reason, we are now looking at Malta as a country to attract nurses to relocate to Ireland,” McCann said.

Servisource is advertising vacancies across all nursing positions: operating theatres, intensive care, coronary care, medical, surgery, eldercare, paediatrics, midwifery, psychiatry, renal and oncology.

The agency, which recruits for both Ireland and the UK, has a similar drive planned for Abu Dhabi next month.

Nurses offered assistance to relocate

The agency promises free recruitment with no hidden costs and assistance by a recruitment consultant throughout the entire process, including with the application for an entry visa.

It will even pick up newly-recruited nurses at the airport and drive them to the accommodation being provided for them as well as help them set up a bank account. It also helps with relocating the nurses’ families to Ireland.

McCann said Servisource has been in business for over 20 years and specialised in international recruitment, mainly nurses from India, the Philippines, Africa and the UAE.

Any nurses trained across Ireland are seen as some of the most highly sought-after nurses in the world- Servisource healthcare manager Aileen McCann

Ireland had a lot to offer nurses looking to relocate, she added.

“Any nurses trained across Ireland are seen as some of the most highly sought-after nurses in the world,” she said.

“Ireland has become a multicultural country, part of Europe, and we welcome the different cultures this has now brought to Ireland.

“Ireland has some of the world’s most desirable universities, such as Trinity College, Dublin, not to mention our beautiful landscapes and, of course,  our welcoming Irish people.”

A similar recruitment drive was held at the beginning of last year when a number of nurses from Malta were poached by the UK health service as part of its efforts to control the COVID situation.

The executive committee of care home operators within the Malta Chamber said earlier this year that care homes were “stretched to the limit” due to a staff shortage caused by hundreds of nurses being lured to the UK and by burnout from dealing with two years of the pandemic.

It said that Malta had lost more than 600 nurses to the UK over the past few years as third-country nationals are choosing to go to the UK for work because of better salary and citizenship packages.

International nurses work at Mater Dei Hospital, Mount Carmel Hospital, Karin Grech Rehabilitation Hospital and St Vincent de Paul Residence, Malta’s largest home for the elderly. There are also a number of foreign nurses working for government and private homes.

In the UK, nurses are offered a starting basic salary of £32,000 (€36,000) compared to the current Malta salary of €18,722 for diploma nurses and €21,000 for degree nurses.

Nurses and their spouses and children are also offered UK citizenship with the promise of a short, less bureaucratic process for work and citizenship applications.

Moreover, the UK government has agreed to provide nurses who opt to move to the UK with free accommodation for the first 12 months.