More than 100 nurses from Down Under are coming to work in Oxford's hospitals to ease the nursing recruitment crisis.

And today Oxford hospital bosses admitted the success of the Australian drive could see other campaigns following in Europe, Finland or even Sweden.

A three-woman team of nursing managers visited Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Auckland, New Zealand, for two weeks last month.

And out of 140 nurses interviewed, 102 are due to start working in Oxfordshire from December.

The move followed severe failures to recruit locally or nationally after the county was revealed as having the highest number of nursing shortages outside of London.

Nurses are leaving the service in droves through low pay, poor morale, sickness and stress and in July the Oxford Radcliffe NHS Trust decided desperate measures were called for. The nurses will work at the John Radcliffe Hospital and the Churchill Hospital in Oxford and The Horton in Banbury. About 19 will work in casualty departments.

Janet Grant, Trust deputy director of nursing, said: "A recruitment agency set up the interviews for us and then we went over there and interviewed for different speciali- ties."

"Starting from December there will be 20 nurses a month phased in so we can find accommodation for them. This will go on until about May or June.

"We are not ruling out doing this sort of thing again. It depends on how we can retain the staff. There are other countries we have been thinking about in Europe or Finland and Sweden," she added.

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