Refugees Care: Employment pathways for refugee health professionals in North East England

The United Kingdom (UK) is experiencing an acute crisis in the recruitment and retention of health care professionals. Across the country, there are critical shortages of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and dentists (King’s Fund, 2024). The UK is increasingly reliant on overseas migrant workers to care for us in hospitals, at home, and in GP surgeries. At the same time, refugee health professionals—who have risked their lives finding sanctuary in this country—are often denied the right to work. This project addresses these intersecting crises, documenting lived experiences and exploring pathways for refugee medical retraining and employment in Northeast England. Our aim is to understand the long-term socio-economic effects that inclusion and exclusion to retraining programmes are having for refugee healthcare practitioners and their extended communities in the region (and beyond). Refugees Care is forged in partnership with Investing in People and Community (IPC), a refugee-led charity that provides critical support to refugees across Northeast England. Since 2016, IPC has organised the Resettlement Programme for Refugee Doctors (REPOD), a programme supporting the reaccreditation of refugee care professionals. Funded by NHS England, 108 refugee candidates have accessed REPOD, with 33 successfully requalified and now working in the NHS, most of whom live and work in Northeast England. Despite its successes, we know little about the long-term effects of this retraining and even less about those who leave or are ineligible for the programme. Our project brings together a dynamic multi-disciplinary research team of frontline refugee advocacy workers, human geographers, a medical researcher and a filmmaker. We will conduct 106 semi-structured interviews to document the lived experiences of refugees who have completed, left, or were deemed ineligible for REPOD. This work is important in three key respects: firstly, there is little existing knowledge concerning the long-term socio-economic integration and wellbeing of refugee health professionals who have completed REPOD; secondly, we do not know why substantive numbers leave the programme; thirdly, there is a gap in knowledge about the possible deskilling of refugee health professionals (nurses, dentists) for whom there is no pathway to reaccreditation. Our study is particularly significant as there has been little scholarly or media focus on the experiences of refugee health workers in Northeast England—a crucial region that, per capita, has the UK’s highest concentration of dispersed asylum seekers (Walsh and Jorgensen, 2024), many of whom reside in areas of high deprivation (Hirschler, 2021). Our objectives are three-fold. One, we will document ‘best retraining practices’ across the UK, evaluate and inform revisions of IPC’s REPOD, and produce academic publications and presentations. Two, guided by our advisory council of senior NHS manager and refugee doctors, if supported by our findings, a key output would be a formal partnership between the IPC and Newcastle University’s (NU) School of Medicine, providing refugee doctors access to NU resources and clinical placements. This would create a model used to forge other such partnerships in the northeast. Three, we will create a 40-minute documentary film offering powerful insight into the lives of refugee health professionals. This output will be deployed to substantively raise the public understanding of refugees in the UK. With accompanying public forums, the film will be screened in locations across the UK. Taken together this work stands to transform the understanding of employment pathways for refugee care workers in the northeast.