The Experts in Our Midst deserve more than our gratitude. They deserve our protection.

A statement from Global Health Partnerships 

In August 2024, as riots spread across England and Northern Ireland, we published a statement standing in unwavering solidarity with the diaspora and internationally recruited staff of the NHS. We hoped never to have to write its successor. This week, we must. 

Over recent days in Belfast and across Northern Ireland, internationally recruited health and care workers – the people we call the Experts in Our Midst – have been targeted in their homes, in their streets, and at the doors of the hospitals where they work. A nurse at the Ulster Hospital was pursued into her own workplace by masked men. She completed her shift. Nurses who treated the victim of the knife attack that preceded this violence now find themselves intimidated from going to work: traumatised, as the Royal College of Nursing has observed, twice over. Families have been burned out of their homes. Lists of addresses have circulated. Health and Social Care leaders in Northern Ireland have been unambiguous: without their international colleagues, the service would collapse. 

We condemn this violence without qualification. But condemnation, on its own, is no longer enough. We said much of this in 2024. The fact that we are saying it again tells us that statements of solidarity, however sincere, do not by themselves change the conditions in which this hatred takes root. 

What is needed now is an honest account of what we owe to one another. 

One in five NHS staff report a nationality other than British. Every day, in every part of the United Kingdom, internationally recruited health and care professionals diagnose our illnesses, deliver our babies, dress our wounds, sit with our dying, and care for our parents in their final years. They staff the wards, the care homes, and the community services on which British citizens depend, and without them the system would not stand. They bring something more besides: connecting the UK to more than two hundred health systems around the world, they are health diplomats, carriers of knowledge between systems, the living infrastructure of the partnerships that make healthcare better both here and in the countries they come from. And earlier this year, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Health and Security calculated that internationally recruited staff have saved the NHS some £14 billion in training costs alone. That figure describes a debt we owe to the countries that trained these professionals, and to the professionals themselves. 

A nation that recruits the world’s health workers, depends on them to keep its health service standing, and banks billions of pounds from training it did not pay for, incurs an obligation. At minimum, that obligation includes safety: the unremarkable expectation of walking to work without being hunted, of living in a home without an X sprayed on the window, of raising children without packing in the night. 

The family of the man injured in last week’s attack said it best, with a grace that shames the mobs claiming to act in his name: migrants make a deeply valuable contribution to this country, not least in its health service, and this tragedy must not be used to divide people. 

To our internationally recruited and diaspora colleagues across Health and Social Care in Northern Ireland, and throughout the UK, you are not guests in this health service. You are its experts, its strength, and in many places its survival. We see you, we stand with you, and we will keep making the case – in Parliament, with government, and with partners around the world – that the UK’s relationship with the health workers it recruits must be built on mutual obligation, honoured in policy and in protection alike. 

This week has been frightening for the whole health and care workforce, staff born in Northern Ireland and staff born overseas alike, who stood together through barricades and cancelled buses to keep services running, and who treated every patient who came through their doors, including the man whose injury was so cynically exploited to ignite this violence. Our admiration and gratitude extend to every one of them. It is one workforce, one family – and an attack on any of its members diminishes and endangers it all. 

Global Health Partnerships remains committed, with our partners and fellow NGOs, to building an anti-racist health community in the UK and in every country where we work. This week has shown, again, why that work is not optional. 

——

Global Health Partnerships (formerly THET) works in partnership to support health workers across the world. Our Experts in Our Midst programme champions the contribution of internationally recruited and diaspora staff to the NHS and to global health.