The lived experience of Nigerian nurses on integrating into British nursing: implications for the health care workforce

Barker (2018) described the UK National Health Service as ‘‘One NHS, many Nationalities’.
• There were 27,982 (52.96%) British Minority Ethnic (BME) nurses compared to 24,847 white nurses and 88,631 (43.9%) BME staff in London NHS as of May 2018. However, staff from ethnic minorities in the NHS are represented more at the lower grades than at the senior
grades ( NHS Digital, 2019).
• International educated nurses (IEN) face myriads of challenges such as poor progression rate, communication and organisational challenges in UK healthcare service (Allan, 2015) and research has shown that large numbers of ethnic minority nurses suffer different types of discrimination and other barriers or challenges in the National Health Service (Archibong & Darr, 2010,
Kline, 2014). Despite BME nurses representing 52.96% of London nurses, BME nurses in the London region experienced the highest level of discrimination in the country (RCN, 2019). • Although there are a good number of ethnic minority nurses for example ethnic minorities of Nigerian descent that have been successful in UK healthcare in gaining promotion to senior grades or positions, there is very little known about their lived experiences and interpretation of integration into the UK healthcare.
• This study uses the Ager and Strang (2008) framework to inform the interpretation of the lived experiences of nurses perceived to have navigated the challenges and integrated into the UK; to understand ‘the ‘how’ of workforce race equality’ (WRES, 2019:5).