Filipino nurses face deportation in Cambridge, UK

More than a dozen nurses from the Philippines who have lived in Cambridge in the United Kingdom since four years ago to help ease staffing shortages are facing deportation. The Cambridge Evening News reported Friday that the Home Office refused to renew the work permits of the Filipino nurses who are all senior carers in Cambridgeshire county. Senior carers had been taken off the national shortage jobs, the report said. The nurses left the Philippines in 2003 under a UK recruitment scheme for carers when it became difficult to hire nurses from the European Union. The Filipino nurses are not losing hope though that they would still be allowed to stay after city assemblyman David Howard has taken up their case. "These are qualified and hardworking nurses who came to this country at our request and they are now simply being discarded. This is not the way to treat people doing a very important and difficult job," Howard was quoted to have said in defense of the nurses. Some of the nurses work at residential care homes but others visit housebound patients in their own homes. Howard has asked Liam Byrne, minister of state for the Home Office, to save the Filipino nurses from deportation. “This policy seems unfair and ill-judged and I hope your department will reconsider it. This decision will lead to a shortage of carers. I hope the Home Office will reassess whether this role should be again included on the shortage list to allow these vacancies to be filled by overseas staff," Howard said in a letter sent to the Byrne. The Home Office had announced it would no longer issue work permits to foreign nationals for senior carer positions. But Howard reminded the Home Office that "without these important staff, vulnerable adults will not receive the care they require which puts additional pressure on family members and informal carers." All the nurses are trained to NVQ level 3 and are working with work permits. A Home Office spokesman said: "We treat each work permit renewal on a case-by-case basis and cannot comment on individual cases. The shortage list is made up of roles where professionals within the industries involved have told us there is a chronic shortage of applicants." - GMANews.TV