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The recruitment of South Asian people into the nursing profession: a knowledge review

It is over 20 years since the Department of Health established (with the King’s Fund) an Equal Opportunities Task Force to explore the apparent under-representation of minority ethnic nurses in the National Health Service and their concentration in the lower grades and less-prestigious specialties (Culley and Mayor, 2001). The first comprehensive national research into minority ethnic nurses, published in 1995 (Beishon et al., 1995), went on to demonstrate in a systematic study, an important aspect of diversity in the minority ethnic nursing workforce. Although around 8% of the workforce were from minority ethnic groups (broadly representative of the population as a whole), this figure concealed significant differences between groups with those from ‘black’ census categories technically over-represented, whereas those from South Asian groups (Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi) were significantly under-represented. There is little evidence of a substantial improvement in this situation in the ensuing years. It is a picture which contrasts of course, with a healthy recruitment from these communities to the medical, pharmacy and dentistry professions. What can research tell us about this issue? This review of existing studies exploring potential barriers affecting the recruitment of British South Asian people to nursing demonstrates, in fact, that our understanding of this issue remains quite poor. It concludes that we are still far from a comprehensive understanding of the reasons for a failure to recruit from some minority communities. Although there is a great deal of speculation and anecdotal evidence on why South Asian young people are not attracted to or successful in entering nursing in significant numbers, the review demonstrates a paucity of robust research to inform this issue. In summarising the results of published studies, the paper importantly points out some of their conceptual and methodological limitations – the use of essentialised concepts of ethnicity; a failure to differentiate between sub-groups within the ‘South Asian’ category; small sample sizes and a failure to adequately establish the effect of ethnicity in the context of other aspects of diversity, such as gender or social class. It also makes the point that some of the more systematic studies (such as that of Iganski et al. into recruitment to nurse education) are now somewhat dated. Journal of Research in Nursing ©2008 SAGE PUBLICATIONS Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore VOL 13 (2) 161–162 DOI: 10.1177/ 1744987108088654 R E V I EW