Nurses who are trained in their region and do not practice there despite the investment made. The cause? Job instability, daily and even hourly contracts, low salaries, shortage of professionals, the recognition or not of the specialty, not seeing the professional category that they should have recognized… In total, 8,119 nurses emigrated last year, the largest part to another province or autonomy (6,646) and 1,473, abroad, and as the preferred destination, Norway. To understand the magnitude of that figure, it is enough to say that it is slightly less than all the nurses who graduate each year (about 10,000).
These are some of the data that the president of the General Nursing Council (CGE), Florentino Pérez Raya, offered yesterday in relation to the mobility of these professionals. Pérez Raya reiterated that “the main reason for this high mobility is none other than the job insecurity that the sector is experiencing and within it the temporary employment and poor working conditions.” And the temporary employment rate among nurses does not drop below 30%, very far from the 8% set as a goal by the Government.
“Nurses who live linking contracts, often for days and even hours, see how their personal life is affected and it is almost impossible for them to reconcile. Giving up a contract, which is sometimes offered overnight, entails a penalty that takes them directly to the bottom of the job market. How can they not look for another place, whether outside their province or in another country?” Pérez Raya asks.
According to Diego Ayuso, general secretary of the CGE, nursing is a profession that currently has full employment. For this reason, “the way to attract nurses is for them to move from another place, hence there is high mobility within the national territory,” he explained.
For Ayuso, “it is no coincidence that the region that retains the most nurses (Navarra) is also the one that offers the best conditions to its professionals. But it not only affects the salary, if you work in a service with ten other colleagues, your care burden is not the same as if you work with half as many. The overload, the stress of not having enough staff also takes its toll, if you see that you cannot care for your patients as they deserve, that is also relevant when choosing to change your address.”
While in Europe the ratio of nurses per 1,000 inhabitants is 8.73, in Spain it is 6.3. Between communities, the disparity is enormous, almost doubling between the one with the most (Navarra, with 8.93) and the one with the least, Murcia (4.74).
But they not only emigrate to other regions, but also abroad. In 2023 alone, 1,473 nurses requested the necessary documentation to practice outside Spain. The main destinations are Norway (336), the United States (226) and the United Kingdom.
Another drama, according to José Luis Cobos, vice president of the CGE, is that “Spanish nurses are in high demand in the most developed countries in the world.” “Our training and international prestige – he adds – makes them very valuable for any health system. But this is making us lose highly prepared human capital.”