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NHS recuriting Polish speaking nurses because so many immigrants using the NHS

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2845767/The-English-hospitals-need-nurses-speak-patients-Polish.html

And people wonder why the NHS has billions in a funding gap. Hospitals are going to recruit Polish speaking nurses because so many patients do not speak English

Thoughts on this? Clearly it is a sign immigrants are overwhelming the NHS? Should we be encouraging them to learn English and to integrate more? Are these Polish nurses taking jobs of British nurses and should immigrants get health insurance to pay for the NHS

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Original post by Ace123
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2845767/The-English-hospitals-need-nurses-speak-patients-Polish.html

And people wonder why the NHS has billions in a funding gap. Hospitals are going to recruit Polish speaking nurses because so many patients do not speak English

Thoughts on this? Clearly it is a sign immigrants are overwhelming the NHS? Should we be encouraging them to learn English and to integrate more? Are these Polish nurses taking jobs of British nurses and should immigrants get health insurance to pay for the NHS


LOL- I can speak polish:smile:
I'm sorry, but if you immigrate to a country and use its services, you should be able to speak the language! It's not that much to ask, just learn it for God's sake. This is stupid, if the patients can't understand then tough.

The only situation where using a translator would be acceptable is if a tourist comes to the UK and is unfortunately hospitalised during their stay here. But if they live here and regularly use NHS services, then there's no excuse - tough shiz.
Reply 3
I don't think the NHS can cure jerking knees.
Recruiting Polish speaking nurses doesn't mean recruiting Polish nurses, and certainly doesn't mean recruiting them from Poland. It means the NHS is attempting to save money on bringing in translators.
While I don't agree with health tourism, and I'd rather that people who I will be interacting with on a daily basis spoke English (shop assistants, doctors - particularly important, bus drivers etc.), if a person who is more comfortable in Polish needs to go to see a health professional while they live in this country, they should be able to understand what they are being told.

My sister used to work with a Polish immigrant, her English was brilliant by the standard of most immigrants, but every now and then she'd have to look up a word on her phone's translator. That would take time the NHS didn't have, and it would be more likely that during a medical consultation she'd stumble across words she didn't know than us chatting about pizza toppings and her having to look up what anchovies were.
Why not just learn English if you move here?
Original post by minimarshmallow
Recruiting Polish speaking nurses doesn't mean recruiting Polish nurses, and certainly doesn't mean recruiting them from Poland. It means the NHS is attempting to save money on bringing in translators.
While I don't agree with health tourism, and I'd rather that people who I will be interacting with on a daily basis spoke English (shop assistants, doctors - particularly important, bus drivers etc.), if a person who is more comfortable in Polish needs to go to see a health professional while they live in this country, they should be able to understand what they are being told.

My sister used to work with a Polish immigrant, her English was brilliant by the standard of most immigrants, but every now and then she'd have to look up a word on her phone's translator. That would take time the NHS didn't have, and it would be more likely that during a medical consultation she'd stumble across words she didn't know than us chatting about pizza toppings and her having to look up what anchovies were.


Looking up a word on your phone wouldn't take much time really and would be more cost effective than specifically hiring Polish speaking staff.

If her English is so great then she should be able to understand what the doctor is saying as he could easily just explain something in a simpler way if she doesn't understand. Most native English speaking people don't know every medical term out there either.
I don't agree with the comments made about the immigrants having to know the language before they seek work. First of all the need for them to come over into Britain meets both the individual and Britain's needs. Britain needs the injection of workers to keep growing and the individual is coming over to improve his standard of life. Now to answer you question, I don't see this as being a bad idea to an extent. The Poles who are a significant population in London will hugely benefit from this. The problem lies with how many of the Polish speaking nurses do you employ before it gets out of hand. In my opinion at least as long as it's a small number of Polish speakers they employ it shouldn't affect negatively on others. :biggrin:
Original post by stinkysockdraw
I don't agree with the comments made about the immigrants having to know the language before they seek work. First of all the need for them to come over into Britain meets both the individual and Britain's needs. Britain needs the injection of workers to keep growing and the individual is coming over to improve his standard of life. Now to answer you question, I don't see this as being a bad idea to an extent. The Poles who are a significant population in London will hugely benefit from this. The problem lies with how many of the Polish speaking nurses do you employ before it gets out of hand. In my opinion at least as long as it's a small number of Polish speakers they employ it shouldn't affect negatively on others. :biggrin:


It's not about having to learn the language of the host country for work reasons. There are probably Polish immigrants who come to the UK but work for Polish employers and speak Polish at work. If you want to do that, fine - your life.

It's for societal reasons. If you have a weak grasp of the English language, you're not going to be able to integrate well into the society. But that's not the point of this thread.

The point is, the host country shouldn't have to accommodate to immigrants, the immigrant has to adapt to the country he or she moves to - that involves learning the language so he or she can function in everyday life. This means that if the immigrant needs medical attention, he should be able to talk to the doctor in English, not Polish or whatever language.

This also applies if a British person emigrates elsewhere, they should have to speak the native language of the country they move to.
(edited 9 years ago)
The NHS should just stop paying for translators in order to save money, that responsibility should lie with the individual who requires the service.


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Original post by miscounted_time
The NHS should just stop paying for translators in order to save money, that responsibility should lie with the individual who requires the service.


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I think that's too sinister. Is it fair that a individual that's only come into the country for a short period of time is turned away because he has not picked up the language yet ? Costs should never overvalue the health of another person.
Reply 11
Original post by miscounted_time
The NHS should just stop paying for translators in order to save money, that responsibility should lie with the individual who requires the service.


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I suppose if you need medical treatment in a country that does not have English as a native language, the health workers should refuse to speak to you even if they did speak English or knew someone who could translate.
Original post by Maker
I suppose if you need medical treatment in a country that does not have English as a native language, the health workers should refuse to speak to you even if they did speak English or knew someone who could translate.


What? Where on earth did I state that health workers should refuse to speak to a patient even if they speak the same language? If a health worker speaks the same language as a patient then of course they should interact with that patient. All I said was that the burden of paying for a translator should not lie with the NHS but on the patient requiring the service.


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Original post by stinkysockdraw
I think that's too sinister. Is it fair that a individual that's only come into the country for a short period of time is turned away because he has not picked up the language yet ? Costs should never overvalue the health of another person.


I didn't say they should be turned away, I said they should be the one to pay for the services of a translator. Many countries, including members of the EU already employ this policy.
If they are on holiday I would imagine that they would have some sort of insurance in place, if they are a resident here then they must have some sort of income.


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(edited 9 years ago)
Er... You realise this is an article from the oh so reliable, not even a little bit racist or biased daily mail, right?!

Besides that, I cannot speak for everywhere, but in my trust there is a tragic shortage of nurses (many English nurses go abroad for better rates of pay and to work for people who respect their skillset much more) so we have been forced to hire a lot of Spanish nurses. It is expensive but the truth is they are not taking English jobs, many English nurses just don't want to work here.

It is still a blanket rule in the trust that only official translators can help non english speaking patients for reasons of confidentiality and to avoid confusion. We have many Polish domiciliary staff and if they converse in Polish with one another near one of our patients they get into a lot of trouble (we have confused patients and it upsets them).

As I say, can only speak for what I have seen working in the NHS, but I think people need to consider the source of this information and remember that actually, the foreign nurses my trust has bought in have done an amazing job filling the gaps where there are not enough English nurses to fill!
Reply 15
Original post by Ace123
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2845767/The-English-hospitals-need-nurses-speak-patients-Polish.html

And people wonder why the NHS has billions in a funding gap. Hospitals are going to recruit Polish speaking nurses because so many patients do not speak English

Thoughts on this? Clearly it is a sign immigrants are overwhelming the NHS? Should we be encouraging them to learn English and to integrate more? Are these Polish nurses taking jobs of British nurses and should immigrants get health insurance to pay for the NHS


The polish are actually one of the best nationalities immigrants in terms of integration which they usually do within a single generation. As long as they've actually learning the language the there isn't a problem. But I'm not really sure what to say about the nurses - except that a lot of healthcare and care professionals come from abroad so getting polish speaking ones isn't going to make much of a difference. Also immigrants pay tax and therefore for the NHS so really what's the problem.
The ideal situation would be where every immigrant learns the language of the country he moves into, that's true. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world. Just to warn you, this post will be very severely influenced by my living in a very poor region of the relatively poor country that Poland is.
We live in a country where the minimal wage is just about enough to pay for the bills of a run-down flat and the cheapest food. Thing is, it's growing increasingly difficult to find menial jobs where you can earn a minimal wage - we have the problem of so-called 'trash contracts', which essentially encompasses the gray zone of the job market; the employees are hired on a 'pay for creation' instead of 'pay for work' basis, which means the employers pretty much aren't legally bound to pay them. Or to pay for their health care, or to give them paid leave, or do anything that the Poles enjoyed throughout the years of being 'communistic'.
So, more and more Poles are forced to emmigrate in order to feed their families. Thing is, a ton of them comes from poor, uneducated families (vicious cycle, anyone?), so they never learned English nor did they ever feel the need to. When they get to England, which is quite often their first time outside of Poland (and the tickets have to be paid for as well), they find themselves surrounded by a completely foreign culture. Have you ever moved country? I understand it may be quite difficult for you, coming from a developed country, to empathise with problems of the Slavs, but, the English-speaking communities in Spain should be a tad bit more understandable for you - the easiest way out is to create a small enclave, where you can pretend you are still in your fatherland. We are all human, after all, you can't expect several hundred thousand people to willingly abandon their comfort zones.
And this comes to my final point: we're all human, we're all European, and we should strive for the entire humanity to have comfortable lives. Just closing yourself off from other cultures only speaks of closed-mindedness. That is to say, my country is suffering from that problem as well - a lot of Poles are racist towards the Romani, Romanians, Moldavians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs... The list goes on and on, and point to an irrational sense of possession: 'I was born here, so the land is mine'. There is never too little to share!
I don't expect my post to change the opinions of nationalists, conservatives, or anyone else who has despised immigrants before it. I just hope it makes you understand why we leave our fatherland and symphatise with our struggles a bit.
Given how eager health authorities in other countries have always been to speak English to make me feel more comfortable (even when I spoke the local language), any uproar about doing the same for Poles seems sad and comical in equal measures.

Why so keen to make an experience that can already be intimidating in your mother tongue even worse for fellow people (the majority of whom, in case you hadn't noticed, are paying British taxes like the rest of us)?
Yet another anti-immigrants hatred filled article in Daily Mail...By the NHS has been employing translators for years, so the police...nothing new here. If you have somebody coming to UK in holiday...they have an accident and they don't speak english, what do you do? As a student nurse i cared for people that spoke little or no english. I remember we had an old Chinese lady at some point, she was confused, in an unfamiliar place, feeling unwell and she couldn't speak a word in english...How can you help that person, how can you give her proper care without being able to speak with her. Translators in hospitals are not unusual in any civilized country.
I do agree that if you move into a country where you are going to remain for several years, you must be able to communicate in the language widely spoken there. But what if someone came to the country as a visitor for short time, suddenly felt sick? That's the different case.