• July 11, 2020

Malayalee nurses begin to arrive in hordes to UK after a temporary pause in recruitment after Covid

Malayalee nurses begin to arrive in hordes to UK after a temporary pause in recruitment after Covid
By A Staff Reporter

LONDON July 11: Malayalee nurses have started to arrive in the UK after a lull in nurses recruitment by NHS. The temporary pause in the recruitment scene was brought about by the outbreak of the Covid pandemic. Finally after a three month wait, a batch of 23 Malayalee nurses from Kerala arrived in the UK on 9th July 2020.

Speaking to this website Febin Cyriac of Envertiz Recruitment said:”It is comforting news that the UK recruitment that have been put on hold following Covid has now resumed.
UK recruitment was temporarily suspended following the cancellation of its flight service from India on 22 March due to a lockdown. It was becoming a stumbling block for hundreds of nurses and their families.
To make matters worse, the recruited nurses’ visa was also nearing its expiration as they had to be in the UK within a month of the visas been granted”.
Many nurses who had worked outside Kerala and in many foreign countries had returned home before leaving for the UK but a good percentage of nurses were worried about what to do when they were caught off guard due to the Covid pandemic.
Despite the opening of UK visa offices in Kerala this week, some campaigns and news had raised concerns that the UK will impose further restrictions on travellers from India as the number of Covid patients in Kerala and India continues to rise but the fact that the number of Covid patients in the UK is declining.
Although international flights from India have not yet resumed, the nurses arrived in the UK yesterday on Air India special flights to the UK as part of the Vande Bharat mission.
The nurses landed at London Heathrow Airport at 7 pm on Thursday evening on a special Air India flight from Thiruvananthapuram and Kochi airports via Delhi.
The nurses were brought to the UK by a UK-based Malayali-owned company called Envertiz Consultancy. Although the visas had expired, they brought their nurses to the UK after obtaining special permission from the UK Government and Air India.
The nurses will work at Sheffield Teaching Hospital and Rotherham General Hospital.
The UK government’s new guidelines stipulate that everyone arriving in the UK must be quarantined for fourteen days, after which they will only start work.
Although we do not know whether international flight operations would resume from India. It is expected that more nurses will be arrive in the coming days.