BRITAIN’S nursing crisis is set to become even worse as a fifth of the services’ already struggling staff approach retirement, a damning new report has revealed.

Health and care services in all 53 countries of the European region are at a “critical juncture,” the study by the World Health Organisation (WHO) warns.

And Britain is recruiting fewer new nurses compared with some of the poorest countries in the European Region, including Romania and Albania.

Britain’s nursing leaders blame low pay as a major factor in failure to recruit.

The WHO’s 190-page report says that problems in Britain also include an 18 per cent reduction in the number of overseas-trained nurses working for the NHS in 2020-2021 compared with 2019-20.

It noted that health services across the European region faced problems before the Covid-19 pandemic, with the pandemic exacerbating an already worsening situation.

Pat Cullen, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, Britain’s biggest union for nurses with 300,000 members, said: “This report highlights the crisis the country faces with too many nurses poised to retire and too few coming into the system.

“It finds a fifth of the UK’s nursing workforce is reaching retirement age and that it is churning out too few nursing graduates — less than the average for other European countries and less than half as many as Romania, Albania and Finland.

“Ministers must take note. Urgent investment in nursing must include fair pay and measures to boost the domestic workforce, such as funding tuition fees.

“This report calls for nursing staff and other healthcare workers to be put at the centre of the economic and social recovery after the pandemic —fair pay is a simple way to recruit and retain nursing staff and keep patients safe.”

The WHO said in its summary: “European countries must now prioritise their health and care workforces by investing more and investing smarter.”

It said the workforces’ “interests and well-being” should be at the forefront of policy making, the should be placed “not only at the centre of the health policy agenda, but also at the heart of economic and social recovery.”

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: ”We have commissioned NHS England to develop a long term workforce plan to recruit and retain more NHS staff and have launched a taskforce to drive up the recruitment of international staff into critical roles across the system this winter.”