EU staff at Great Ormond Street hospital

“25% of all staff who are clinicians [at Great Ormond Street] and 24% of all research staff come from non-British EU countries.”

BBC Question Time audience member, 3 November 2016

There are figures to show this for doctors, but we’re still trying to track down the evidence on research staff.

Almost 13% of Great Ormond Street hospital's total full time equivalent (FTE) staff were from the rest of the EU, as of September 2015. The same applies to 23% of its doctors and 17% of all doctors and nurses (‘clinical staff’).

An article from the Health Service Journal had similar findings earlier this year, and also reported nearly a quarter of research staff at Great Ormond Street were citizens of other EU countries. We haven’t been able to back this up, so we’re getting in touch with the publication.

How does this compare nationally?

In June 2016 5% of all NHS FTE staff in England were from the EU, or almost 56,000 people. In London it was much higher at 11% or just over 19,000.

However, all these figures come with a health warning.

NHS staff report their own nationality and this can range from the country of their birth to the country they have most cultural affinity with. NHS Digital, which publishes the information, also warns that nearly 100,000 NHS staff records don’t contain useful data on nationality because staff either aren’t asked to provide it or choose not to.

Update 4 November 2016

We received more recent data from NHS Digital on the proportion of staff at Great Ormond Street Hospital who reported they were from other EU countries.

In June 2016 14% of all staff at the hospital were from other EU countries. This is the proportion of individual people employed rather than FTE however. The same was true for 23% of doctors and 18% of all clinical staff (doctors, nurses and health visitors).