UAE jobs: Being a nurse now offers visa benefits, better salaries, easier licensing

Dubai: The UAE has always been an attractive work destination for healthcare professionals, and amendments in 2022 have made it even more lucrative to move here to work as a nurse.

Health professionals have been migrating for decades. The US and UK have the largest number of foreign-trained nurses among OECD countries, but they are more heavily concentrated in other nations. Before the pandemic hit, roughly one-in-four nurses in New Zealand and Switzerland had studied abroad, the highest ratio among the OECD’s 38 member states, a Bloomberg report revealed.

With pandemic-related travel restrictions easing, countries from Germany to Singapore are stepping up efforts to lure foreign nurses and other medical professionals with promises of expedited visas and better pay.

Hiring from Philippines, India

This is great news for job seekers in the industry, specifically for nursing graduates from the Philippines and India. Globally, the Philippines remains the biggest exporter of nursing talent, closely followed by India.

Nearly half of new UK nurses and midwives are from abroad, the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) said. The NMC’s annual report showed 48 per cent of the 48,436 new nurses and midwives were from other countries, with 66 per cent from India or the Philippines.

Germany’s government said it wants to recruit 600 Filipino nurses for hospitals and elderly care centers, offering qualified applicants free travel expenses, language training, a bonus for passing exams on the first try and help finding accommodation, its embassy in Manila posted on Facebook September 5. Singapore and the Philippines also opened talks last month on hiring more Filipino nurses and other health care workers.

Why work in the UAE

In April, the UAE announced that it would offer Golden Visas to frontline heroes in the pandemic fight, and others with critical skills. This year, many nurses found that their two-year visas had been changed out for ten-year Golden Visas.

This in addition to tax-free income makes the UAE one of the most preferred countries for nurses to live and work in. The average monthly basic salary for entry-level nurses in the UAE ranges from Dh5,000 to Dh7,000, as reported by online jobs and salary survey platforms such as Glassdoor and Indeed. The average salary of a nurse, as per the Salary Guide and Hiring Insights for the UAE in 2022, was expected to be around Dh11,500 per month.

In yet another positive change, there was an update to licensing rules for nurses in the UAE. The country's health authorities in July scrapped the two-year work experience requirement for bachelor's degree holders to get registered. While all graduates still need to pass the competitive exam to get a Registered Nurse (RN) licence to work in the UAE, the change in experience requirement is expected to increase recruitement of fresh graduates.

Diploma holders can attend the exam and apply for the Assistant Nurse licence without work experience. School nurses, however, still need two years of work experience to get accredited, of which one year must have been in paediatrics, ICU, or the Emergency Department. Nurse practitioners and specialty nurses also need prior experience to get licensed.

Deals and MoUs

The UAE signed an accord with India in February, which includes expedited approval for skilled workers, including nurses. The UK, another top destination for nurses, signed deals with Kenya, Malaysia and Nepal over the past year to hire unemployed health workers, with the potential to have some travel and training costs covered.

The UK, another top destination for nurses, signed deals with Kenya, Malaysia and Nepal over the past year to hire unemployed health workers, with the potential to have some travel and training costs covered.

During and post COVID-19, the demand for qualified healthcare professionals has been critical. The global health care staffing sector expected to grow 6.9 per cent a year to $63 billion by 2030, according to Grand View Research.

“You’ve got this mismatch between the supply of nurses and demand for health care,” Howard Catton, chief executive officer at the Geneva-based International Council of Nurses (ICN) told Bloomberg. ICN predicted that the gap in demand and supply of nurses is expected to widen to 13 million in the coming years.

“It has become much more competitive,” Catton added.

- Inputs from Bloomberg