Travelling is My Life

We’ve always had the travel bug. In fact, when we got married, that was one of the things that my wife and I wanted to do: travel beyond Australia and see the world. We’d done a bit of it at first, but once the kids came along, that kind of went on the back burner for a bit. Plus, my work as a nurse kept me pretty busy! However, now that the kids are a bit older, we decided that maybe the time had come to go overseas again – and that this time, we’d make it a bit more long-term and actually work outside Australia. The kids would be old enough to appreciate the exposure to a different culture.

The first question we had to ask was where we could go. Where can Australian nurses work overseas? We also had to think about the kids and their education – they’d need to go to school somewhere, and we wanted them to get an education in English. The obvious answer that sprang to mind was to work as a nurse in the UK. My wife originally came from the UK when she was younger, and her parents were still in London. The idea that the kids would get more time with that set of grandparents was also a plus.

It didn’t take me very long to find that there’s a real need for experienced nurses in the UK and that it’s straightforward to get a nursing job in England, especially if you’re an Australian nurse wanting to work in London – and London was where we wanted to go.

I found out that it’s possible to get a special visa for travel nursing abroad in the UK, known as the Health and Care Visa. That would make it easier for me to get a nursing job in the UK (it wouldn’t be a problem for my wife and the kids). The fact that I would have this visa would also mean that the kids would be able to attend a state school, so that was good for them.

It seemed almost too good to be true. Could it really be that easy to get a job as an Australian travel nurse in the UK? Naturally, there were several hoops we had to jump through. Although this might have felt like a bit of a nuisance, I found it reassuring. After all, as a registered Australian nurse, I know how important it is to ensure that all the staff are properly trained and qualified.

What I Needed To Become A Nurse In The UK

So what did I need to have in order to get my UK nursing license and start working as a nurse in London? I found a good NHS nursing recruitment agency (NHS stands for National Health Service, by the way), and they pointed me in the right direction. In fact, the person I emailed was very keen, as there is a real need for international nurses in the UK, especially for nursing in London. The fact that I’m a bloke (yes, I’m a male nurse) wasn’t going to be a problem at all. In fact, there’s been a bit of a push in the UK for increased gender diversity in nursing, so I was more than welcome (racial diversity is something that UK nursing already does very well, which is why they’re used to setting up nursing jobs in the UK for international nurses).

Obviously, I had to be a proper nurse – so that was one box I could tick off. What the London nursing agency was looking for in an international nurse in the UK was someone with a proper nursing degree or diploma (yes), at least one year of experience as a nurse (I’ve got 12 years of Australian nursing behind me, which is why I was ready for a change and to try nursing in England), and a nursing license (yes again).

Being a nurse in England would mean that I would be dealing with English-speaking colleagues, doctors, supervisors and patients (and physiotherapists, etc.). This meant that the next thing I had to do was to prove that I was fluent in English. As a fair dinkum Aussie, I think I’m pretty good at that. All the same, I’ll confess to being a bit nervous about this, as nobody likes having to take a test, and you’d feel a bit of a prat if you can’t pass a language test in your own native language. I’d also heard stories about people from Ireland not passing an English proficiency test when coming to Australia, but that was because it was a computer with voice recognition messed the assessment up because it didn’t recognize accents. However, I wanted to apply as a nurse in the UK, and I’ve seen enough to know that they’ve got so many regional accents in the UK that this was unlikely to happen to me – and it didn’t. My video-speaking test went pretty well. If you can hold a conversation in the workroom or explain a procedure to a patient, you can pass this test.

Of course, this was just the start. I then had to go through all the paperwork. I’d also need to sit and pass some tests to get my UK nursing registration. As I said, it’s reassuring to know that they only hire properly qualified people as registered nurses in the UK. The test in question was the Objective Structured Clinical Exam (OSCE), and it’s set by the NMC (Nursing and Midwifery Council – the UK has its own set of acronyms and names for different organizations and regulatory bodies, which will take a bit of time to get used to). However, I didn’t have to take the tests while still in Australia – the London nursing recruitment agency told me that I could sit that within my first 12 weeks of working as an Australian nurse in the UK and that the particular NHS trust that would be acting as my sponsor would help me through a refresher course so that I could get up to speed, especially in areas where the UK’s nursing system is different from what we’ve got in Australia.

Family Matters

When the kids found out about it (they’d had their suspicions, and we did all the groundwork), they had questions. Things like where we were going to live and where they were going to go to school, and if they’d be able to learn how to play soccer (which we’re all going to have to learn to call football if we’re going to be in the UK for long enough). Some of the questions we couldn’t answer straight away, but there was one thing that I learned from the London nurse recruitment agency: the NHS is very supportive of Australian nurses working in the UK (and Canadian nurses working in the UK and New Zealand nurses working in the UK, etc. – they recruit international nurses from all around the world to work in England). This means that they’d arrange for some accommodation for us to get started with, and they’d also send someone from the NHS trust I’d be working with to meet us at the airport and take us to the accommodation they’d arranged. This was something of a relief, as I didn’t really like the idea of having to find my way around by rental car in a very large and unfamiliar city that’s notorious for traffic congestion while jetlagged from a trip halfway around the world. I wasn’t able to say exactly where the kids would go to school, but I said they’d probably end up in the nearest state primary school (and no, it wouldn’t be like Hogwarts from Harry Potter). And they’d definitely learn how to play soc– football.

I have also reconciled myself to the idea that my kids are going to talk like Brits, especially if I end up working for long enough as a nurse in London.