HOSPITAL bosses are offering English lessons to foreign nurses who need to improve their language skills for working on the wards.

The tailor-made classes and one-to-one sessions at Airedale Hospital are being offered to all new nursing and midwifery staff from Europe and further afield who need it, said the Trust's Director of Nursing Rob Deardon.

New rules came into force this month meaning all nurses and midwives from Europe will have to prove their English is good enough to work in the UK. If they have not trained or worked in an English-speaking country before they will now have to pass a language assessment first.

Those rules already stood for job candidates outside the EU.

Recruitment chiefs at Airedale, who have just taken on 27 nurses from Croatia and Romania taking its number of foreign staff to 92, already tests potential new starters before any jobs are offered.

With the help of international recruitment experts, all of Airedale's foreign job candidates are put through, and have to pass, a written and spoken English test before getting shortlisted for any work. If successful they have a 20 minute telephone interview before coming face-to-face with a panel.

In 2014/15 Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which runs Bradford Royal Infirmary and St Luke's Hospital, recruited 41 Spanish nurses, and the first cohort of 36 Filipino nurses should be starting this summer.

Three Italian nurses are also due to start at the end of this month and other EU nurses at the end of February, said the Trust's Director of Human Resources, Patricia Campbell.

"While we continue to recruit nurses locally and nationally, and would urge anyone looking for a job to consider Bradford, in 2014 and 2015 we expanded our nursing recruitment drive to consider other EU countries after the numbers coming through to appointment remained low due to a lack of available, trained UK-nurses.

"All applicants are required to demonstrate an appropriate standard of English language competency as part of selection processes.

"We place great importance on a candidate’s ability to communicate effectively with patients. Good communication skills lead to a better patient experience and help us to maintain a high level of care."

Nursing Midwifery Council chief executive Jackie Smith said: "The ability to communicate effectively with patients is fundamental to patient safety and a principle that is central to our code. We can now investigate patient safety concerns in relation to a nurse or midwife's ability to communicate effectively in English.

"Along with the new EU alerts mechanism, which will make it easier to share any fitness to practise information with other EU Member States, this will greatly improve patient safety."

In December, a study found patients treated by nurses educated abroad were less likely to feel confident in the care they receive and report less satisfaction.