‘If we leave, Nepal will suffer’: embattled hospitals fear impact of UK job offers

As Nepali nurses weigh up the benefits of an NHS salary, any staff drain will worsen shortages in the country’s creaking healthcare system

The emergency department at Kathmandu’s Bir hospital is already packed with patients, but still they come, in wheelchairs and on stretchers, filling every space. A man is lifted off a bed, still attached to three tubes, to make room for a new arrival. Another is handed an oxygen mask from a fellow patient. Security guards man the sliding metal entrance gates to try to control the flow.

“It’s very difficult. Always busy – even more than this. Sometimes, [there’s] two or three to a bed,” says nurse Shalu Chand, squeezing between two patients on trolleys as she rushes to fit a saline drip. “The workload is too much and the salary too little.”